Location: Remote (EU) - Type: Full-time, contractor
We're Atlas XR, the team behind Beyond Sandbox, a top-selling title on the Meta Store and the most wishlisted VR game ever. We're building physics-driven, modder-friendly VR experiences on a custom Unreal Engine 5.5 fork (Unreality), and we're scaling our ambition fast.
We're a small team of 8 people (mostly engineers), and we ship aggressively. Our bar for craft is high, the work is technically demanding, and the people you'll be working alongside are some of the strongest in VR. If you want a sleepy 9-to-5, this isn't it. If you want to ship something genuinely advanced and see it in the hands of hundreds of thousands of players, keep reading.
The Mission
We're building some of the most advanced AI systems in the VR industry, across companions, enemies, civilians, and emergent gameplay agents. We want NPCs that feel like they actually live in the world: aware of their bodies, their environment, the player, and each other.
This role is the technical lead for that effort. You will own the AI stack.
What you'll work on
Designing and shipping advanced AI behavior using Unreal's State Tree as the primary authoring surface — selectors, tasks, evaluators, conditions, and the integration glue around them.
Building tightly-coupled AI + Animation systems: motion matching, layered state machines, animation-driven AI decisions, IK, root motion, procedural locomotion, and full-body coordination.
Architecting perception, navigation, decision-making, and group/squad coordination at a scale that runs comfortably on Meta Quest hardware.
Owning the C++ infrastructure: actor classes, components, controllers, blackboard/state tree extensions, replication for multiplayer AI, debug tooling.
Collaborating with our animation, design, and gameplay programmers to push AI from "scripted behavior" into something that genuinely surprises players.
Making the architecture calls that the rest of the AI work will rest on for years.
What we're looking for
Must have:
Strong production experience with Unreal Engine 5 in C++ (not just Blueprints).
Deep, hands-on experience with State Tree — you've shipped or seriously prototyped with it and have opinions about where it shines and where it doesn't.
Strong animation systems background: AnimBP, Anim Graph, state machines, blend spaces, motion matching, IK rigs / Control Rig, root motion, and how AI drives all of this.
A real track record of clean, maintainable C++ and architectural judgment, you know when to abstract, when not to, and how to leave a codebase better than you found it.
Ability to thrive in a fast-moving startup: high autonomy, high ownership, short loops, no hand-holding.
Excellent written English.
Strongly nice to have:
Shipped a title with AI you're proud of (ideally VR or console-scale performance constraints).
Performance optimization on mobile/standalone VR (Quest 2/3/Pro), significance budgeting, LODs, animation budget allocator, threading.
Experience with networked/replicated AI in multiplayer.
Familiarity with perception systems, EQS, NavMesh customization, smart objects, MASS.
What we offer
Full-time, fully remote. EU time zones strongly preferred for overlap with the team.
Competitive salary, calibrated to seniority and location.
Real ownership: you're not implementing someone else's design, you're shaping the AI direction of a top-selling VR title.
Direct collaboration with the CEO and the rest of the engineering team. Short decision loops, no politics.
The chance to ship work that hundreds of thousands of players will interact with — and that other VR studios will be benchmarking against.
How to apply
Send a short intro, your CV/portfolio, and ideally a writeup, video, or repo of an AI system you built to jonathan@atlasxr.co. Tell us what you owned, what you'd do differently, and what you're proudest of.
We read every application. Strong candidates will hear back within a week.