Fractional Senior Game Designer

About Exient

Exient is an independent games studio with a long track record of building and operating high-quality titles for mobile and beyond. Our portfolio spans original IP and world-renowned franchises, and our teams work across the full lifecycle, from concept and prototyping through live operations and ongoing content. We are a small and highly collaborative studio where designers have real ownership over the features they ship.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Game Designer to join us on a contract basis to strengthen our design capacity across multiple live and upcoming projects. This is a hands-on role for someone who can hit the ground running: contributing complex design work from day one, raising the quality and velocity of the team, and helping to advance our AI-assisted design workflows.I 

This is a distinct, self-directed contractor engagement. You will operate as an independent supplier of design services under a contract for services, using your own judgement and working methods to deliver agreed outcomes across our project roadmap.

You will work closely with our existing design, art, engineering, and production disciplines to design, balance, and polish key features, and to flex onto proposals, pitches, and new opportunities as they arise.

What You'll Work On

As a Senior Game Designer at Exient, you'll play a central role in the design of our live mobile games, with Lemmings, one of gaming's most iconic franchises, at the heart of your work. This is a hands-on role for someone who can own features end to end and thrive across multiple projects at once.

Day to day, you'll:

• Own feature and systems design for live free-to-play games. This means taking ideas from opportunity and concept through to detailed, implementation-ready documentation, then tuning and balancing them post-launch. It spans everything from onboarding and early-retention flows to monetisation, economy and live-ops events.
• Design against data and player behaviour, working closely with Product, Analytics and Production to shape decisions around KPIs, retention and revenue, validate ideas through A/B testing, and turn insights into clear, actionable design.
• Deliver a steady stream of seasonal and event content, keeping our games fresh through regular seasons, events and live-ops moments, often to external client and platform requirements.
• Work across a varied portfolio. Lemmings is the core focus, but you'll also contribute to our wider slate of live and partner titles, taking ownership of your projects and balancing priorities as they shift.
• Contribute to new concepts and pitches, helping shape GDDs, proposals and concept pitches for prospective projects and partners, including competitive analysis and scoping.
• Design within real-world constraints, building features that meet evolving compliance and regulatory requirements as part of a responsible, player-first approach.
• Help push our craft and ways of working forward, including making the most of AI-assisted design workflows, which are increasingly part of how our team works.
• Partner across disciplines, working closely with artists, engineers and producers to take designs from documentation through to polished, well-integrated features in the game. 
• Prototype and pressure-test ideas quickly, using rapid iteration and playtesting to refine gameplay and feel before committing to full production. 
  

You'll be a senior, autonomous member of a small, collaborative team, trusted to lead your own work, raise the bar on quality, and support and mentor those around you.

This list is indicative rather than exhaustive. The specific mix of work will flex with the studio's roadmap and priorities during the engagement.

AI-Assisted Design Workflow

You'll help elevate the AI-assisted ways of working already part of our design process. Our focus is workflow AI, using AI tools to work faster and smarter. The ideal contractor already treats these tools as part of their everyday craft and knows when to rely on them and when not to.

We're looking for practical, demonstrable experience using AI to accelerate design work, for example:

• Ideation: generating and stress-testing divergent ideas at speed, then applying senior judgement to select what's worth building.
• Structured specification: turning rough mechanics into explicit rule sets, state tables, and documentation ready to critique and prototype.
• Economy and balance: accelerating the arithmetic-heavy work of curves, progression, and tuning tables, then validating through playtesting.
• Rapid prototyping: reaching a playable, testable prototype faster, so more time goes on judgement, feel, and polish.
• Documentation and iteration: drafting and maintaining design documentation, and feeding playtest results into the next iteration.

Just as important is knowing where human taste is irreplaceable: the strongest designers use AI to reach a playable build faster, then spend their judgement where it counts.

Experience & Qualifications

• A minimum of five years' game design experience, the majority within a mobile games company.
• A demonstrable track record of shipping and operating live mobile titles.
• A degree in Games Design, Interactive Media, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience working on complex design projects in a fast-paced, multi-project environment.
• A portfolio or case studies that show senior-level design thinking across mechanics, economy, and player experience.

Technical Skills

• Strong command of core-loop, meta-game, game balance, economy, and monetisation models.
• Excellent understanding of UI / UX and a strong sense of game flow, pacing, and player experience.
• Ability to conceptualise, prototype, and implement game concepts using a range of tools, and to iterate from data and player feedback.
• Practical, hands-on experience integrating AI tools into a design workflow (as described above).
• Proficiency with design tooling such as Figma, Unity, Git, Jira, Confluence and Claude.
• Confident with data: reading analytics, forming hypotheses, and using KPIs to guide balancing decisions.
• Broad knowledge of games, with genuine passion for casual, mobile, and classic arcade genres.

Ways of Working

• Self-motivated, organised, and able to deliver reliably while working largely autonomously.
• Clear written and verbal communication in English, with the ability to document and present design decisions.
• Collaborative and dependable when working across disciplines and time zones.
• Strong sense of accountability and ownership, with openness to self-critique and constructive feedback.
• Comfortable moving between projects and adapting quickly to shifting priorities.