Principal AI Engineer (AI games)

UserWise is an innovative game studio focused on building and scaling mobile games globally using AI-assisted workflows. Unlike traditional game teams, UserWise emphasizes ownership, clarity, and rapid execution by leveraging AI-driven processes. The company operates with a global team dedicated to creating production-ready games and scaling them effectively through LiveOps.

Key Responsibilities
You will serve as the Principal AI Engineer, owning the AI infrastructure and automation layer that supports the entire game production lifecycle. This senior individual contributor role reports to the Head of Internal Games and collaborates closely with the Chief AI Officer and cross-functional teams including product, production, engineering, user acquisition, creative, QA, and game operations. Your primary mission is to accelerate the entire process from idea generation to prototype, launch testing, and scaling decisions by building reliable, production-grade AI systems.

You will design and maintain the technical architecture for AI and automation across the studio, establishing shared infrastructure, engineering standards, and reusable systems that enable faster iteration. Responsibilities include building AI agents, tools, and automated workflows that support opportunity research, creative production, QA, launch testing, and LiveOps. You will integrate external AI models and APIs (such as Claude Code, MCP servers, Cursor) with Unity pipelines and internal tools.

Additionally, you will develop AI-powered analytics and reporting tools to transform game and operational data into actionable insights. Monitoring workflow health, identifying bottlenecks, and automating high-impact manual tasks in partnership with various teams will be key. You will also evaluate new AI models and tools rapidly, improving system reliability, scalability, observability, and cost efficiency while establishing data security and quality guardrails. As a senior technical leader, you will mentor engineers and empower both technical and non-technical teams to leverage AI effectively.

Required Qualifications
- Extensive software engineering experience with a proven track record of designing and shipping production systems.
- Hands-on experience with large language models (LLMs), AI APIs, agents, or automation platforms.
- Demonstrated success in delivering AI-powered systems, internal tools, or automation workflows used in production environments.
- Strong programming and systems engineering fundamentals.
- Familiarity with modern LLM development patterns, including tool/function calling, agentic workflows, model integration, evaluation, and orchestration.
- Experience integrating APIs, third-party platforms, and cloud-based systems.
- Solid understanding of data pipelines, analytics, and leveraging data for automated decisions or reporting.
- Ability to design reusable, scalable, and reliable systems rather than one-off prototypes.
- Aptitude for translating ambiguous problems across diverse teams (product, design, art, UA, QA, operations) into technical solutions.
- Sound judgment regarding build vs. buy decisions, model selection, performance, reliability, security, and cost.
- Comfortable working in a fast-evolving technical environment with rapidly changing tools and models.
- High ownership mentality, capable of identifying problems, making decisions, and delivering solutions independently.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
Experience with Unity and C# is a strong plus, along with a background in building tools or infrastructure for game development. Familiarity with mobile gaming or other fast-iteration consumer products, as well as knowledge of free-to-play (F2P) metrics such as retention, engagement, CPI, monetization, and LTV, will be advantageous.

UserWise offers competitive compensation, paid time off, performance bonuses, and annual performance reviews. The studio environment promotes high ownership, hands-on architecture and execution, rapid prototyping and iteration, and a production-first mindset with minimal bureaucracy. AI is deeply embedded in how the team designs, builds, tests, and scales games, enabling practical impact over theoretical research.

Success in this role means enabling teams to move significantly faster through reusable AI workflows, automating repetitive production tasks, improving visibility into game performance and workflow health, and maintaining reliable, cost-efficient AI systems that can quickly adopt new capabilities without disrupting production.