Lead designer
| Highest | $9,000 / mo · United States |
|---|---|
| Experience | 5+ yrs |
| Degree | Required |
| First paycheck | Month 1 as designer, 4 to 6 years to Lead |
Pay in the destination countries
Monthly, in US dollars. Each country is an Imora admission package — open one for that route's fees, language requirement and deadline.
| Country | Monthly |
|---|---|
| United StatesTOEFL 80–100 · $10–70k | $9,000max |
| CanadaIELTS 6.0–6.5 · CAD 20–40k | $7,900 |
| Hong KongIELTS 6.0–6.5 · HK–200k | $7,650 |
| SingaporeIELTS 6.5 · SGD 18–35k | $7,650 |
| United KingdomIELTS 6.0–7.0 · £11–38k | $7,650 |
| SwitzerlandIELTS 6.5 · CHF 0.9–8k | $7,400 |
What does the day look like?
A standard work schedule is 40 hours per week. What teenagers imagine — brainstorming concepts, playing games, and writing lore — makes up just 10% of the day. The remaining 90% is execution and overhead: maintaining technical Game Design Documents (GDDs), modeling mathematical economy tables in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, reviewing daily builds in Unreal Engine 5 or Unity, and logging bug tickets in Jira. The rest goes to sprint planning, mentoring junior designers, and resolving feature trade-offs with lead artists and programmers.
Workflows rely daily on tools like Perforce Helix Core (P4V), Git with Git LFS, Notion, Miro, and diagrams.net. Routine night shifts or on-call duties do not exist, except during major live-service deployment windows. However, during the final 2 to 3 months before a milestone release, overtime crunch can expand workloads to 50 to 60 hours per week.
Where does this lead?
Next step up
People arrive from
What do you make of this job?