Mid-level / Senior Platform Engineer (Porting / Co-dev)

Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects. That includes world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres.

We are seeking a passionate Platform Engineer to help across various, technically ambitious projects. You will work across platform-facing systems on modern consoles, including PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2. You will implement new features, fix bugs, profile and optimize existing code. This role is remote-friendly in Canada (Pacific-time overlap required).

• Own and evolve platform systems in proprietary engines across PC and consoles, with an emphasis on performance and reliability.

• Implement and optimize memory systems (allocators, pools, paging/streaming heaps, fragmentation mitigation, lifetime tracking, OOM safety).

• Build and tune I/O and streaming foundations (async file I/O, decompression pipelines, asset streaming, prioritization, bandwidth/latency hiding, patch-friendly layouts).

• Improve CPU performance and scalability (job systems, thread scheduling, contention reduction, cache/memory locality, frame-time stability, hitch reduction).

• Integrate and maintain platform SDK-facing code and abstraction layers, ensuring clean boundaries between platform-specific and cross-platform systems.

• Profile and optimize using platform and internal tooling (CPU sampling, memory trackers, I/O traces, performance capture tools) to identify bottlenecks and regressions.

• Partner with gameplay, rendering, audio, and content teams to define budgets, best practices, and guardrails that keep builds performant and stable.

• Contribute to tooling and workflows that improve developer velocity (profiling hooks, telemetry, regression tests, automated reporting, validation checks).

• Communicate clearly to production and stakeholders on constraints, trade-offs, risk, and roadmap for performance and platform readiness.

• Enjoy learning about bleeding edge technologies and implementing them from scratch.

• Get excited to work on things that you’ve never worked on before.

• Embrace being a generalist that can jump into various areas of a game engine, like platform APIs, streaming, rendering, audio, etc.

• Have strong modern C++ and systems-level debugging skills (multithreading, performance profiling, low-level investigation).

• Have solid understanding of console constraints and performance fundamentals: CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, cache behavior, and storage/I/O characteristics.

• Ability to take ownership, deliver maintainable solutions, and contribute constructively to team standards.

• Any side projects you can share.

• Shipped at least one title on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and/or Nintendo hardware, especially with platform/performance responsibility.

• Familiarity with platform profiling workflows (e.g., PIX and equivalent console tooling) and building internal performance diagnostics.

• Experience creating performance regression detection (benchmarks, automated captures, dashboards) and production-friendly guardrails.

• Experience with Unreal Engine.