System Designer

As a Senior System Designer on the Vanilla team, you will shape the game’s player progression, balance and gameplay together with the other designers. You will primarily work on creating, balancing and tuning new and existing systems to create a fun game for our players. Carefully adjusting the curves and tables that control the relations between item progression, character level, mob scaling and other systems are key to creating a rewarding player experience and will all be important in your role. We also believe you will suggest design changes and ideas on new systems to improve the player experience. You will collaborate closely with gameplay designers, creative stakeholders and programmers, in a highly iterative process, to ensure our systems are well-balanced, fun and rewarding.
Since you will tweak numbers directly in the code you need programming or scripting experience. We also think you have a strong desire to learn what makes Minecraft lovable for such a huge and diverse player base, and how to balance and tune systems for Vanilla to ensure we keep that magic of Minecraft while also always updating and improving it.
Your tasks will include...
Balance and tune existing and new systems in Vanilla, such as player experience points, item tiers and rarities, mob scaling, combat damage, and in-game economies to create a fun, satisfying and exciting gameplay experience.
Analyze how players use our current game systems to help us understand how they can be improved through balance or design changes.
Gather and act on game balance feedback with the aim to create the best possible experience for all our players. We are very happy about our diverse player base and put a lot of effort into thinking about all players when designing Vanilla.
Support our game designers on creating new systems for the game.
Collaborate with your team and others at the company on creating the best experience for our players and on ensuring we follow our creative vision for Minecraft.
Adapt to technical constraints when needed, and suggest technical improvements where you think it’s important for achieving the high quality systems we want.
Participate in brainstorms related to Vanilla development.

Requirements
A strong understanding of systematic game design.
Solid foundations in game design overall.
Experience working with system design in the games industry.
Ability to evaluate game systems and identify system design issues.
Ability to suggest high quality solutions to system design issues.
Desire to be part of a creative and highly collaborative team and ability to take feedback and direction.

Valued skillsets
Mathematical foundations to underpin curves and tables.
The team values inclusivity, diversity, transparency and collaboration – as you’ll be working closely with us, we hope you’ll feel the same way!