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Senior Gameplay Simulation Engineer — Large-Scale Battles

The Role

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We are looking for a Senior Gameplay Simulation Engineer to help build the core battle system for our upcoming title Dragontwin. This pivotal role centers around designing and developing a large-scale medieval fantasy battlefield simulation and related gameplay systems in UE5, leveraging crowd simulation techniques and RTS gameplay elements to achieve epic battles on a massive scale. The ideal candidate is a strong real-time systems engineer with an interest in large-scale simulation, potentially from a background such as gameplay engineering, engine programming, technical art, rendering, tools, AI, or another hybrid technical background.

About Draconic

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Draconic Interactive is a small Stockholm-based independent game studio founded in late 2024 to develop its debut title, Dragontwin. The studio was founded after early prototype gameplay resonated strongly with players and demonstrated the potential of the game and concept. Since then, Dragontwin has built a growing community of dedicated fans, with frequent development updates and playable builds released to Patreon supporters.

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We are a small but passionate team, so this role will be high-impact with significant ownership over one of the game’s most important technical and gameplay pillars.

What you'll do

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  • Own and develop core systems for our large-scale battlefield simulation, including units, formations, orders, targeting, and battle behavior.

  • Prototype and evaluate CPU, GPU, Mass/ECS, Niagara, and hybrid approaches for achieving scale while preserving gameplay feel.

  • Build efficient local avoidance, pathfinding, steering, and movement systems for short- and long-range unit behavior.

  • Develop simulation LOD, representation swapping, and actor/proxy systems for handling both close-up interactions and large battlefield scale.

  • Implement natural-feeling crowd behavior, group motion, and unit interactions.

  • Profile and optimize CPU/GPU-heavy systems across simulation, animation, rendering, materials, and asset usage.

  • Build tools and workflows that make battle-system iteration faster for both technical and creative team members.

  • Contribute broadly to gameplay and technical development in a small, collaborative team.

What makes you a good fit

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  • Strong engineering experience in games, simulation, real-time graphics, tools, or performance-sensitive systems.

  • Experience building complex real-time gameplay, AI, animation, rendering, simulation, or engine systems.

  • Solid understanding of performance tradeoffs, profiling, debugging, and optimization in real-time applications.

  • Comfort working in ambiguous technical areas where the right solution needs to be discovered through prototyping and measurement.

  • Interest in large-scale battles, crowd simulation, RTS systems, or emergent gameplay.

  • Good communication skills and comfort collaborating across technical and creative disciplines.

  • A pragmatic mindset focused on systems that are maintainable, scalable, and shippable.

Experience with any of the following is especially valuable

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  • UE5 gameplay systems, Mass Entity, ECS, or data-oriented design in general.

  • Advanced Niagara GPU simulation concepts or equivalent particle simulation concepts, such as simulation stages, grids, PBD, data channels, RT drawing/sampling, iterative solvers, etc.

  • Crowd systems, swarm intelligence, flocking algorithms, boids, ant colony sims or similar.

  • Animation optimization techniques such as VATs, update-rate optimization, multithreading, etc.

  • Shaders, materials, or rendering optimization.

  • UE editor tools or custom workflows.

  • Shipping UE titles or working in small independent teams.

  • Relevant personal projects, prototypes, papers, demos, or experiments.

What we value

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  • Ownership and initiative

  • Technical curiosity

  • Clear communication

  • Practical problem solving

  • Thoughtful tradeoffs over unnecessary complexity

  • A collaborative mindset

Location

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Stockholm, Sweden

The role is remote-first for now, but we are primarily looking for someone based in Stockholm or able to work from Stockholm regularly in the future. As the team grows, we expect to move toward a more hybrid setup. Our working language is English.

Applying

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Applications can be sent to careers@draconicinteractive.com

 

Please include:

  • CV or LinkedIn

  • Portfolio, GitHub, showreel, prototype video, technical writeup, or examples of relevant work

  • A short introduction about yourself and what interests you about the role

 

We are happy to look at personal projects, experiments, technical demos, modding work, research prototypes, or unusual hybrid experience.

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