Gameplay Programmer, Games, Inception, DeepMind

hackajob is collaborating with Google to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

Inception runs like a startup, balancing high energy idea generation with pragmatic, clear and regularly refined operations. This collaborative, multidisciplinary group is situated primarily in London and Mountain View with collaborators across the globe. It has a sizable portfolio of early stage, design focused projects, building on working processes developed internally on projects such as Astra and Genie.

As a Gameplay Engineer and Prototyper in Inception, you will build interactive experiences, blurring the lines between game development and AI research. Your mission is to move beyond traditional game engineering to prove what is possible when generative models and agentic workflows become core mechanics.

You will be a key bridge between research and design, moving fast to stand up 0-to-1 prototypes, crafting expert pipelines when necessary, and finding novel technical solutions to creative problems. You will work in a cross-functional environment where every project involves significant experimentation, rapid iteration, and close collaboration.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in one or more programming languages (e.g., C++, Python, or JavaScript).
• Experience leading technical strategy across multi-disciplinary teams (e.g., Research, Product, Design) to align engineering roadmaps with non-technical business goals.
• Experience in a technical leadership role (Lead or Staff) through the full software development Life Cycle (SDLC) for one or more shipped AAA title or large-scale interactive product.
• Experience in game tech research and development, including AI/ML, procedural generation, and advanced engine optimization.
• Experience in architecting 0-to-1 systems.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience training ML models or integrating generative AI into consumer-facing products.
• Experience building high-performance web frontends or interactive browser-based experiences.
• Experience contributing to open-source projects or leading innovative technical experiments.
• Familiarity with Google’s internal infrastructure (google3) and development workflows.
• Knowledge of modern game engines (Unreal, Unity, Godot) or proprietary internal frameworks.

Responsibilities:

• Design and rapidly implement the technical foundations for gameplay prototypes that utilize agentic workflows and generative models as core mechanics.
• Build internal tools, scaffolding, and workflows that empower designers and researchers to easily experiment with complex AI pipelines.
• Lead the integration of small- and large-scale streaming models into game environments, creatively hiding latency and consistency issues inherent to probabilistic models.
• Partner closely with designers and research scientists to solve "unsolvable" technical bottlenecks in early-stage, design-focused projects.
• Build compliant pipelines for data managing and model testing where stability matters, while maintaining the speed and flexibility required for rapid game prototyping.