Design Director – RS4

Overview

As Design Director for RS4, you will shape the core MMO design architecture in collaboration with the Creative Director, leading a multidisciplinary team to deliver a scalable, long-lasting player experience. You’ll drive progression, economy, content, social systems, endgame, and live operations, ensuring cohesion across systems and a strong RuneScape identity. This senior leadership role focuses on guiding design strategy, mentoring teams, and balancing vision with scalable execution. You’ll partner across Creative, Production, Engineering, UX, and Analytics to ship a world players want to call home for thousands of hours.

Pay / Benefits

• Private Healthcare including Dental Plan
• Pension contributions (minimum 6%)
• Employee Assistance Programme & onsite counselling
• Life Insurance
• Discretionary annual performance bonus
• Enhanced family leave policies from day 1

Responsibilities

• Translate the Creative Director’s vision into a coherent MMO experience
• Own the MMO design architecture across progression, economy, content, social systems, endgame, and retention
• Set design strategy, principles, frameworks, and quality bars for the project
• Lead the Design team, mentoring leads and senior designers with clear ownership
• Design for longevity, enabling long-term progression, engagement, and live development
• Collaborate with Creative, Production, Engineering, UX, Analytics to ensure scalable designs
• Use playtesting, telemetry, and feedback to identify problems and iterate
• Anticipate and address MMO-specific risks like economy health and exploits

Key requirements

• Proven game design experience with MMOs or persistent online worlds
• Senior design leadership on at least one shipped MMO or major persistent title (pre-production through launch)
• Ability to translate a Creative Director’s vision into a coherent MMO design framework
• Deep MMO systems knowledge: progression, itemisation, economies, combat, social systems, endgame
• Experience building or owning an MMO content model and balancing content velocity
• Live MMO experience using telemetry and community feedback to inform retention and economy health
• Strong understanding of AAA engine development, with Unreal Engine experience
• Experience leading a sizeable multidisciplinary design organization and making difficult calls
• Passion for MMOs and ability to modernise RuneScape principles

• leadership and mentoring
• creative partnership
• clear decision-making
• Unreal Engine
• telemetry and data-driven design
• live operations planning

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