Technical Director

At ZeptoLab, we're looking for a Technical Director to own the continued technical evolution of Bullet Echo and help transform its engineering system.

This is a senior technical leadership role focused on shaping architecture, improving engineering effectiveness, and driving AI-first development across a live product.

What you'll do

• Define the technical vision for Bullet Echo and set the direction for client, battle server, and backend architecture.
• Evolve the architecture and engineering practices of an established live product with a large and complex codebase.
• Own the technical roadmap, engineering quality, technical debt, and key technical risks.
• Evaluate product initiatives in terms of feasibility, cost, risks, time-to-market, and architectural impact.
• Manage technical priorities and engineering capacity across product development, LiveOps, and technology development.
• Improve engineering processes with a focus on reducing the end-to-end development cycle from task definition to production.
• Drive the adoption of AI-first engineering approaches across development and testing.
• Assess the technical team, identify development opportunities, and help build a strong and effective engineering organization. 

What we're looking for

• 1.5+ years of experience as a Technical Director, CTO, Technical Lead, Lead Engineer, or in a comparable role with significant ownership in live game development.
• Strong C++ background and experience working with a large production codebase in a live product.
• People management experience, with the ability to lead, develop, and evaluate a technical team.
• Strong understanding of real-time multiplayer architecture, including client/server interaction, synchronization, networking, and battle servers.
• Strong understanding of high-load backend architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience improving engineering practices within an established team and legacy environment, with measurable results.
• Experience with LiveOps and production engineering, including releases, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, hotfixes, and incident management.
• Experience defining technical strategy and managing technical debt, architectural risks, and engineering capacity.
• Strong practical experience with AI-assisted or agentic software development and introducing AI into team-wide engineering workflows.
• Strong ownership and ability to independently define technical direction and drive change.
• Experience with custom game engines would be a strong plus. 
• Fluency in both English and Russian would be considered an advantage.

Why this role is interesting

• The opportunity to set the technical direction of Bullet Echo and have a real impact on how the product evolves.
• A high level of autonomy and ownership — we expect you to bring your own vision, identify what needs to change, and drive it forward.
• The opportunity to rebuild software development and testing around AI agents, with humans setting goals and overseeing the work at key points.
• Strong support from the company to drive meaningful changes and experiment with new approaches.

As part of the recruitment process, we will need to process your personal data in order to review your application and communicate with you. You can find more information about how we handle your data in our Recruitment Privacy Notice at https://zeptolab.com/recruitment-privacy-notice.

1.5+ years of experience as a Technical Director, CTO, Technical Lead, Lead Engineer, or similar role with significant ownership in live game development. Strong C++ background and experience with large production codebases. People management experience, including leading and developing a technical team. Strong understanding of real-time multiplayer architecture (client/server, synchronization, networking, battle servers). Strong understanding of high-load backend architecture and distributed systems. Experience improving engineering practices in established teams and legacy environments. Experience with LiveOps and production engineering (releases, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, hotfixes, incident management). Experience defining technical strategy and managing technical debt, architectural risks, and engineering capacity. Strong practical experience with AI-assisted or agentic software development and integrating AI into workflows. Strong ownership and ability to define technical direction and drive change. Fluency in English and Russian is a plus. Experience with custom game engines is a strong plus.