Team Lead, AI Behavior Systems

Company Description

Ubisoft is a world leader in the video game industry, with teams around the world creating original and memorable experiences, from Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six to Just Dance and much more. We are convinced that diverse perspectives allow both players and teams to thrive. If you are passionate about innovation and pushing the boundaries of entertainment, join us and help create the unknown!

Job Description

By joining us as a Team Lead – AI Behavior Systems, you will join a multidisciplinary team (data, programming, game design and narrative, animation, etc.) guided by a simple and ambitious question: among all the possibilities offered by generative AI, which ones are truly interesting and fun for gameplay?

The team's mission is to test new experiences with players and provide creators with tools so they can imagine more dynamic, immersive, and surprising interactions — even bringing about features that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. Its daily life is at the crossroads of research and development, product development, game creation, and inter-studio collaboration, in service of the gaming experiences of tomorrow.

What you will do

Within the team developing the technological product that enables the creation of these experiences, you will leverage your expertise in machine learning and AI applied to video games to lead the AI Behavior Systems team.

Composed of MLOps programmers, data scientists, and AI programmers, this team is responsible for improving the behavior of our NPCs (non-player characters) and, more broadly, our gameplay systems. It relies on a balance between reinforcement learning, imitation learning, generative AI, and more traditional game AI approaches, such as behavior trees, utility AI, and planners, while ensuring their robustness, controllability, and integration into production.

Responsibilities:

The main and usual functions of this job are:

• Create, prioritize, assign, and track the daily tasks and work progress of your multidisciplinary team (MLOps, data science, and AI engineering) based on deliverables;

• Design and lead hybrid behavior architectures combining reinforcement learning, imitation learning, generative AI, and classic AI approaches (behavior trees, planners, utility AI), as well as define appropriate orchestration levels between learned and deterministic systems.

• Ensure the design of credible, controllable, and high-performance systems aligned with gameplay intentions, and define methods for evaluating behaviors.

• Participate in the design of machine learning deployment architectures (e.g., online reinforcement learning).

• Lead scientific monitoring and applied research activities focusing on decision-making and learning systems.

• Collaborate closely with gameplay, design, and production teams to ensure the adoption of solutions and their impact on the gaming experience.

• Act as a representative for your team;

• Organize and manage your team's meetings;

• Understand the objectives of hybrid AI behavior architectures and master technical constraints to effectively guide/coach your team;

• Provide periodic reports to your management on your team's task progress and propose corrective measures when necessary to meet set objectives;

• Anticipate and address potential conflict situations and suggest solutions to your management as part of problem-solving within your team;

• Serve as a technical mentor to your team members, if applicable;

• Participate in performance reviews in collaboration with your management;

• Participate in the recruitment of new people and their integration into the team;

Qualifications

What you bring

Education:

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, software engineering, computer engineering, or a related field.

• Project management certificate (asset);

Relevant experience:

• 2 to 4 years of experience in gameplay programming or data science

• Initial experience in management or mentoring

• Participation in at least one full game production or a robotics project or equivalent.

Skills and knowledge:

• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and model training environments.

• Experience with reinforcement learning development frameworks (RLlib, TorchRL, or equivalent internal solutions).

• Ability to work in a team;

• Leadership;

• Ability to manage time and priorities;

• Ability to build high-performing teams;

• Demonstrate good interpersonal communication skills;

• Be flexible in organizing your work;

• Be resourceful in finding solutions;

• Ability to delegate;

• Ability to manage stress and change;

• Demonstrate managerial courage;

• Have a sense of initiative;

• Knowledge of distributed architectures and large-scale training pipelines, an asset.

• Knowledge of databases is an asset (JIRA, Perforce, etc.);

• Knowledge of technical constraints related to real-time, 3D engines, and level editors;

• Bilingualism in French and English;

• Knowledge of the tools used by your team members.

• Knowledge of project management (asset);

• Knowledge of each of the other roles in game production (asset);

• Knowledge of the MS Office suite (asset);