AI Design Engineer
Job Description
About Us
NOIA is a game studio under Vertex Games, founded in Shanghai in 2019. We are dedicated to crafting games with a distinctive art style and uncompromising visual quality, while pursuing deep strategic gameplay and high player freedom — empowering every player to express their own unique style.
Over the years we built mobile titles across puzzle, RPG, and strategy genres. In late 2025 we shifted our focus to developing games for Steam, carrying that same pursuit of quality and innovation to a new platform. The team is now expanding in Singapore as we continue to grow.
https://noia.vertexgames.net/
About the Role
We’re looking for an AI Design Engineer to join our studio (around 10 people) developing multiple game titles across genres — from casual puzzle games to deep RPGs for PC (Steam).
This is not a traditional game designer or programmer role. You will be the bridge between design intent and AI-powered execution: translating creative vision into structured prompts, formal design documents, and working prototypes — all through AI tools like Claude, Claude Code, and generative image and video models.
The ideal candidate thinks in systems, asks precise questions, notices details others miss, and treats AI as a reasoning partner rather than a code generator. Our production pipeline is AI-native — we use Claude for deep design analysis and agentic coding, generative models for visual asset production, and AI video tools for frame-by-frame animation workflows.
This role is ideal for someone who is both design-minded and technically curious, able to blend structured thinking with creative exploration.
Key Responsibilities
Translate high-level game design vision into structured, AI-executable specifications — prompts, constraint documents, and formal reasoning frameworks.
Operate the studio’s core AI toolchain: Claude (chat and Claude Code) for design analysis, research, and engineering tasks; AI image generation for visual asset production; and AI video-to-frame animation pipelines.
Maintain and evolve the studio’s formal knowledge architecture: organize design decisions into structured, traceable documentation with cross-references and version control.
Rapidly prototype game systems and UI flows using AI-assisted development, iterating through frequent design pivots without losing structural insight from prior versions.
Produce and manage prompt templates for AI image generation, including style analysis, constraint layering, and iterative refinement workflows.
Author and maintain bilingual (English/Chinese) design documentation.
Act as a critical design reviewer — challenge assumptions, identify logical gaps, and flag decisions that lack sufficient evidence.
Requirements
Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially the ability to articulate vague ideas as precise, actionable constraints.
Broad awareness of design across games, apps, and digital products — a demonstrable habit of noticing specific design choices and being able to explain why they work or don’t. We need people who see the difference between a good animation curve and an unrefined one, not people who say “it looks fine.”
Solid problem-decomposition skills: able to break “it feels wrong” into concrete, attackable sub-problems.
Familiarity with the Unity development pipeline and ecosystem — asset workflow, build process, scripting architecture, and how design decisions translate into implementation.
General programming literacy across languages. With AI-assisted development tools, the barrier is no longer syntax or language-specific knowledge — it’s the ability to understand what code does, guide AI through implementation, and research solutions when stuck. We expect you to be able to work in any language with AI support.
Comfortable with ambiguity and frequent change: our design direction evolves rapidly, and we value adaptability over attachment to prior work.
Proficiency with Claude (both the chat interface and Claude Code) as a daily working tool.
Hands-on experience with AI image generation tools for asset production workflows.
Experience with AI video generation and frame-by-frame animation extraction pipelines.
Excellent communication skills in both English and Chinese to support collaboration across multilingual stakeholders and production workflows.
Able to work full-time on-site in Singapore.
Nice to Have
Experience with additional AI models and tools beyond Claude (ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion, or similar).
Personal projects that demonstrate systems thinking — mods, game jams, design documents, structured wikis, or any evidence of organizing complex ideas.
Background in game design, interactive media, or adjacent creative-technical fields.
Interest in formal reasoning, epistemology, or structured knowledge management.
Previous experience shipping a game or interactive project on any platform.
Direct gaming industry experience is not required. This role is new — it doesn’t map cleanly to any existing job category.
We welcome candidates from varied backgrounds who are:
Precise communicators
Relentless noticers
Independent thinkers
We place a high value on:
The ability to ask the right questions
Demonstrated critical thinking
Genuine curiosity about how things work
If you’ve ever spent 30 minutes refining an AI prompt because the output was 90% right but the last 10% mattered, you might be the person we’re looking for.