Lead Level Designer

Lead Level Designer 🎮Location: Remote-first

Type: Full-time

Start: ASAP

About Couch Heroes

At Couch Heroes, we’re exploring new ground for the MMO genre. In a world where fantasy and ancient technology intertwine, players explore shattered realms, grapple across verticality, solve puzzles, and push back corruption, with progression driven by player expression and discovery.We envision creating a bridge between the gamers of the 80s all the way to the gamers of today, creating a space where both coexist and journey together. We’re developing in Unreal Engine, in early production, with a team spanning multiple countries.

We’re remote-first, based in the UK, and scaling to support a multi-year live-service roadmap. We value autonomy, curiosity, and collaborative ownership, and we’re looking for creators who want to help build something from the ground up. Sound like your kind of thing? We should talk.

About the Job

How a world feels to move through, explore, and share with other players is shaped by level design. We need a Lead Level Designer who can collaborate with art, narrative, and design leadership to define how players experience our open world: from macro zone structure and progression down to the flow of a single hub.

You will report to the Game Director and manage a growing team of level designers (currently 3, scaling to ~7 as production ramps). You will set creative direction for level design while staying hands-on with blockouts and prototypes and represent the discipline across the studio in production planning and resourcing decisions.

We are in early production. The studio has been running for three years, but much of the foundational world structure and level design pipeline is still maturing. You will be shaping standards, building processes, and making design decisions that the team builds on for years to come.

Your RolePeople Leadership and Team Development

• Manage a team of 3 to 7 level designers as the team scales through production: set priorities, assign work, balance workload, and run regular 1:1s focused on progress, career development, and honest feedback.
• Lead performance reviews and goal setting aligned to production milestones and individual development plans. Identify skill gaps and address them through coaching, stretch assignments, or training.
• Represent the level design discipline in cross-discipline leads meetings, production planning, and resourcing conversations. Advocate for team needs and capacity.
• Foster a team culture of creative safety, shared ownership of quality, and honest critique.
• Support hiring as the team grows: contribute to job descriptions, review portfolios, and participate in interview loops.

Level Design and World Building

• Own the creative vision for world layout and zone design: how zones, hubs, and points of interest connect and progress across the open world. Set the bar for spatial composition, navigation flow, vertical gameplay, and environmental storytelling.
• Design spaces that support the full breadth of MMO play: exploration, combat, questing, and social interaction. Build gathering points and hubs that feel alive at varying population levels and reward both solo and group play.
• Stay hands-on with blockout and prototype development. Build, playtest, and iterate alongside your designers, establishing gameplay layouts and hub structures before handoff to environment art.
• Work with quest design and narrative to shape how authored content, emergent encounters, and social spaces coexist within the same world areas.
• Design for the technical and operational realities of a persistent MMO: player density, zone streaming and loading boundaries, spawn flow, performance targets in Unreal Engine, and world structures that accommodate live-service content additions and seasonal events.

Pipeline and Production

• Build and mature the level design pipeline from early blockout through final handoff. Existing processes are partial; you will define best practices, handoff specifications, and quality criteria where they don’t yet exist and tighten them where they do.
• Work with production to manage scope, schedules, and task breakdowns for level design work. Contribute to milestone planning, sprint scoping, and capacity forecasting.
• Use playtest observations and player behaviour data to drive iteration on navigation, pacing, encounter density, and spatial readability.

Must-Haves

• 7+ years in game development, with at least one shipped title in a level design or world-building role.
• 3+ years of direct people management: running 1:1s, setting goals, conducting performance reviews, and developing team members.
• At least 2 years of experience designing for MMOs, persistent online worlds, or live-service games, with a working understanding of shared-space design, zone streaming, and content built for long-term expansion.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating 3D level design with clear examples of spatial composition, player flow, and vertical gameplay.
• Proficiency with Unreal Engine (or equivalent level editors) for blockout, prototyping, and in-engine world construction.
• Strong communication and documentation skills, with proven experience collaborating across disciplines (narrative, quest design, environment art, technical art) to ship integrated world content.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience shipping at least one MMO or persistent online world from production through live service.
• Experience designing for large-scale open-world single-player or co-op titles.
• Exposure to scripting or visual scripting for gameplay prototyping or trigger setup.
• Awareness of accessibility considerations in spatial and level design.

About You

• You lead by investing in people. You find genuine satisfaction in watching your team grow and you actively develop the designers around you.
• You create space for honest feedback, creative risk, and learning from failure.
• You are comfortable working through ambiguity. Early production means not everything is defined yet, and you see that as an opportunity to shape the right answer, not a blocker.
• You balance creative ambition with production pragmatism. You know when to push for a better solution and when to ship what works.
• You work autonomously in a remote environment, proactively keeping your team aligned and your stakeholders informed.

Couch Heroes have partnered with Skillsearch on this hire. Jack is leading the search directly with the studio leadership, so feel free to reach out to him at jb@skillsearch.com. He will be your point of contact throughout. Looking forward to connecting!