Google DeepMind is the London-headquartered AI lab behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, working towards artificial general intelligence. They're hiring a Gameplay Engineer for its Inception team to prototype games where generative models and agents become core mechanics, based in London. This software engineering role sits within the UK's artificial intelligence sector.
Minimum qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5 years of experience in one or more programming languages (e.g., C++, Python, or JavaScript).
- Experience working with cross-functional partners (game designers, artists, or producers) to scope and unblock features.
- Experience architecting core gameplay mechanics, custom tooling, or greenfield technical systems from scratch.
- Experience in commercially shipping or publicly releasing a game across its full lifecycle (prototype to release).
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience training ML models or integrating generative AI into consumer-facing products.
- Experience building high-performance web front-ends or interactive browser-based experiences.
- Practical knowledge of modern game engines like Unreal, Godot, Unity or proprietary internal frameworks.
- A track record of contributing to open-source projects or innovative technical experiments.
About the job
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 show 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.
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.

About DeepMind
Google DeepMind is an AI research laboratory focused on building artificial general intelligence. Founded in London in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman, the company was acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately $660M. DeepMind pioneered breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a world champion at Go, and AlphaFold, which solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem and has been used by over two million researchers worldwide. The lab remains headquartered in London with a large UK engineering presence and continues to push the boundaries of reinforcement learning, large language models, and scientific AI.
Stage: AcquiredLondon
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