Hi Believer, I'm Jake.

I'm an experienced engineering manager, and I love games. I've spent the last 7 years in management roles, growing and leading high-output teams. Most recently, I've been managing the engineering team at One More Multiverse through our game search and pre-production, working in Unity, but I've been making games for as long as I've had access to a computer.

I would love to be a part of Believer as your Engineering Manager for Gameplay. I found Believer's values to be extremely aligned with my own - especially with regards to acting with compassion, casting lifelines, and leaders dodging credit and tanking blame.

I've managed fully distributed remote teams across a global array of time zones, and I understand the unique challenges of working on games in a distributed environment.

My strengths as a leader include providing compassionate, constructive feedback, iterating on processes, and improving rigor and code quality - while resolving tension and building an empathetic culture where people are proud to do their best work, and unafraid to make mistakes.

I believe in doing whatever is necessary to make sure the engineering team can show up every day and know how to make the biggest impact, feel highly motivated and engaged, and do their best work.

I'm well suited to Believer's stage and challenges. I've managed early-stage teams and projects, and I know how to balance urgency with uncertainty and keep making progress. I understand the chaos of startups and of games and I'm excited to help Believer become a world-class engineering team.
I love seeing my colleagues succeed. My job satisfaction comes from helping the teams around me stack up wins. I believe in trusting and empowering the team, leading with transparency and mutual respect, and protecting the team from toil and unnecessary overhead.
Let me be the sponge for stress, uncertainty and chaos. If there is a communication inefficiency, a tool or process that makes the engineers' lives miserable, or some technology or stack problem that is costing tons of time, I won’t rest until it’s smoothed over.
I know that as a manager the most important impact I can make is by making the team better, but I do strive to remain technically credible, and consider it part of my role to understand the work that the team is doing. I create game art and build small games as a hobby to keep my technical skills sharp and stay abreast of the shifting landscape of tools and technologies. Lately I've been prototyping in Unreal Engine 5 and Godot.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read through this. I'd love a chance to talk to you more about what I could bring to Believer. Please reach me at jakelear@gmail.com, or call or text to (540) 207-7032. You can find my resume here.

As a side note, Tim's AQ40 core memory compels me to tell you that I was amongst the first raid team to see C'thun, having secured the world-first kill of Twin Emperors. The encounter was supposed to be unbeatable, as the C'thun encounter wasn't completely implemented yet, but they failed to account for our brilliance (read: indomitable will to cheese the fight).