Gameplay Engineer — Java / RuneBound

RuneBound is our flagship — a long-running Minecraft Java MMORPG we've been building for years. You'd own a major slice of its gameplay code and ship directly to live servers where real players are already running around.

This is a senior role on a small team (currently six engineers). You'd report directly to our technical director and work day-to-day with our design and art leads. Decisions are made close to the code.

• Design, build and maintain gameplay systems across combat, quests, progression and the party layer.
• Own features end-to-end — from the design pitch to the post-launch metrics.
• Work alongside design to prototype quickly and cut what isn't working.
• Contribute to our internal tools where the payoff is obvious.
• Review code, mentor junior engineers, and help raise the technical bar of the team.

• 5+ years building shipped gameplay systems in a production environment.
• Deep experience with Java and the JVM — you're comfortable reading stack traces from someone else's decade-old plugin.
• Strong grasp of networked gameplay: authority, latency, prediction, cheat-resistance.
• Fluent English; comfortable working asynchronously across time zones.
• A portfolio or code samples we can look at (doesn't need to be Minecraft).

• Existing Minecraft Java modding experience.
• Open-source contributions, especially to gameplay frameworks.
• Experience running a live service with on-call rotations.

Everyone at RuneFist gets the same baseline: remote-first, sustainable pace, proper hardware, learning budget and profit share on every released project.

• Remote-first

  We've been remote since day one. Work from wherever you do your best work — coffee shop, home office, other side of the planet.

• Real ownership

  We're small on purpose. Every role shapes the games and the studio. No waiting in line for decisions to be made somewhere else.

• Sustainable pace

  No crunch. Four weeks paid time off. Real weekends. We've seen the other way of doing it and we're not going back.

• Hardware + setup

  Studio-grade hardware, software licences, and a generous home-office budget on arrival. If a thing helps you ship, we'll get it.

• Learning budget

  Yearly budget for courses, books, GDC, conferences, or anything that levels you up. Use it or lose it — we'd rather you used it.

• Profit share

  When the studio does well, the team does well. Transparent profit-share on every released project, paid quarterly.