Senior World / Level Designer & Artist - Social VR

Location: North America Remote / Hybrid in San Francisco preferred
Type: Contract-to-hire, 4-month contract period
Start Date: Immediate
Compensation: $50 – $100 USD/hour depending on experience, availability, location, and scope. If converted to full-time, compensation may include salary, benefits, and equity.

About Us

Vinci Games is building the next generation of social virtual reality games.

Our newest title, Ruffnauts, is a Pokémon-inspired social multiplayer VR game for kids where players ride collectible pets, explore alien worlds, hatch and upgrade companions, uncover secrets, and play with friends. It launched in Alpha on Meta Quest and has already grown to 61K+ reviews, making it the tenth highest-rated VR games of all time.

Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, reached over 1M installs and maintains a 4.9-star rating across 23,000+ reviews an is the 33rd highest rated game on Meta Quest. Vinci Games was also selected as a 2026 Game Changer by GamesBeat, Nasdaq, Lightspeed, and industry judges as one of the Top 25 most innovative startups reshaping gaming and interactive media.

We’re backed by Y Combinator, Makers Fund, and Kevin Lin, Co-Founder of Twitch, with team experience from CD Projekt RED, Oculus, Unity, Google, and Downpour Interactive.

We’re a small, fast-moving, remote team with a rare combination of traction, ambition, and creative freedom. We build through rapid iteration, close contact with players, and bold creative swings on one of gaming’s most exciting new platforms.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on Senior World / Level Designer to shape the playable world, biomes, social hub, and traversal experience of Ruffnauts.

This is an in-engine role focused on rapid prototyping, greyboxing, VR playtesting, and iteration. We need someone who can turn rough ideas into playable spaces in Blender and Unity, test them in headset, and improve them based on movement, feel, flow, scale, readability, replayability, and social interaction.

Ruffnauts is built around expressive pet riding, social play, exploration, secrets, rewards, and movement mastery. You’ll design spaces that feel great to move through repeatedly: hubs, roads, biome entrances, shortcuts, vertical routes, traversal playgrounds, and pet-class-specific paths.

We are not looking for a pure paper designer or high-level worldbuilding consultant. We need someone who can personally build playable spaces, test them, iterate quickly, and help drive them toward shippable quality.

Contract-to-Hire Path: This is a contract-to-hire role with an initial 4-month contract period. We’ll have a 30-day ramp check-in and a conversion discussion around the 90-day mark. Depending on mutual fit, performance, business needs, and agreement on final terms, we may convert to full-time, extend the contract, or conclude the engagement at the end of the initial term. If fit is clear earlier, we’re open to converting sooner.

What You’ll Do

• Rapid prototyping and greybox of VR worlds in Unity for a high speed exploration focused movement game
• Create a foundation for walking/climbing zones, riding zones, and transition zones within worlds in the game to ensure fun to traverse and explore. 
• Design and iterate the Ruffnauts social hub as a playful, readable, movement-friendly space
• Designing and sculpting roads, rails, hills, terrain obstacles, ramps, cliffs, tunnels, launch points, shortcuts, landmarks, racetracks, and momentum based traversal chains
• Create beginner-friendly paths, advanced skill lines, secrets, rewards, and discovery moments with points of interest and verticality in mind
• Design spaces for different pet movement archetypes along with pathways and secrets reachable through skill mastery
• Create in-world challenges and secrets for players to discover. 
• Build multiplayer spaces where players can see, follow, race, help, chase, and show off to each other
• Test frequently in headset and iterate based on VR feel, scale, comfort, readability, and player behavior
• Collaborate with design, engineering, art, and production to turn rough concepts into playable, shippable spaces
• Creation of tools to improve iteration speed and testing of biomes, roads, and highways level design.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional level design, world design, or environment design experience
• Experience designing levels, worlds, hubs, or traversal spaces for at least one shipped or publicly released VR title
• Strong experience greyboxing playable levels, worlds, or traversal spaces in Unity
• Deep understanding of movement, flow, scale, player guidance, route readability, and traversal feel
• Ability to design spaces around different movement types, speeds, skill levels, shortcuts, and mastery routes
• Strong understanding of VR scale, comfort, collision, sightlines, readability, and performance constraints
• Comfort testing frequently in headset and making layout decisions based on actual VR feel
• Ability to personally build playable spaces, not just document or direct them
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to turn ambiguous direction into tested, improved spaces
• Portfolio examples showing levels, maps, worlds, hubs, traversal spaces, or playable prototypes in motion
• Experience with Blender, Maya, procedural terrain, terrain sculpting, road/path tools, or open-world workflows

Bonus Points

• Deep familiarity with Gorilla Tag-style VR locomotion, arm-swinging movement, or social Quest games
• Experience designing social hubs where players gather, linger, show off, interact, and return
• Experience designing movement-driven levels for parkour, arena shooters, hero shooters, Rocket League-style sports, or Trackmania-style maps
• Technical design or scripting ability in Unity
• Experience with prefabs, triggers, checkpoints, route logic, interactables, reward placement, or debug tools
• Experience taking levels from greybox into production with artists and engineers
• Passion for VR, social games, movement games, creature collection, or player-driven exploration

Why Us

At Vinci Games, you’ll have the opportunity to help shape the playable world of a breakout social VR game at a rare stage: early enough that your design decisions can meaningfully define the experience, but proven enough that real players are already showing up.

As a Senior World / Level Designer & Artist, you’ll help define how players move, explore, gather, race, discover secrets, and return to the world with friends. Your work will directly shape the world that makes Ruffnauts feel fun to explore again and again.

We move quickly, test ideas in headset, learn from real player behavior, and iterate toward what actually feels good in VR. You won’t be designing from a distance, you'll be hands-on in Unity, building spaces, testing them, improving them, and helping turn rough ideas into shippable experiences.