SENIOR ANTI-CHEAT DESIGNER

As our Senior Anti-Cheat Designer at BULKHEAD, you’ll design the systems, tools and rules that keep cheaters out of our early access game, WARDOGS. You’ll work closely with Engineers, Data, Community and our Anti-Cheat Observers. Your job is to turn what you know about how cheaters play into detection that works at scale.

You’ll own how we spot cheating. You’ll study player behaviour and telemetry, find the patterns that separate cheaters from skilled players, and turn them into rules, signals and training data for our AI models. Your work protects every match and every player’s trust that the fight was fair.

This role is for FPS players. You need to know first-hand what great aim, game sense and movement look like, because that’s how you’ll recognise when something is wrong. Depending on your strengths, you could focus on aim and combat analysis, movement and positioning anomalies, detection tooling, or the pipeline that feeds our AI models.

What you’ll do:

• Design detection rules and heuristics for aimbots, triggerbots, ESP and wallhacks, recoil scripts, macros, movement exploits and other cheats.

• Find suspicious patterns in gameplay telemetry, such as snap angles, reaction times, tracking through cover and pre-aiming, and turn them into signals we can measure.

• Work with Engineers to specify the telemetry, tools and systems we need, from in-game data capture to internal review dashboards.

• Help shape and train our AI detection models by defining which features matter, what good training data looks like and how labelled data from manual reviews feeds back into the model.

• Tune detection thresholds to balance catching cheaters against false positives. Keeping legitimate players safe matters as much as banning cheaters.

• Track detection performance (hit rates, false positives, appeal overturn rates) and keep improving based on what the data shows.

• Keep up with the cheat ecosystem: new tools, workarounds and how cheat providers adapt, so we stay ahead.

• Work with Anti-Cheat Observers, using their review findings and appeal outcomes to refine your rules.

• Plan ban waves and enforcement strategy with production and community, thinking through timing and impact.

• Explain your reasoning clearly to technical and non-technical colleagues, and stay open to challenge and other ideas.

• Handle sensitive information about detection methods with discretion.

What we’re looking for:

• An avid, experienced FPS player with a deep understanding of competitive shooters, including aim mechanics, game sense, movement and how high-level players think

• 2+ years of experience in anti-cheat, game security, trust and safety, data analysis, or game or systems design

• Familiarity with AI and machine learning concepts, such as classification, anomaly detection, training data, labelling, precision and recall

• A strong understanding of how cheats work and how they show up in gameplay

• A data-driven mindset and the ability to find meaning in large volumes of player behaviour

• Strong problem-solving skills and a methodical, sceptical approach

• The ability to write clear specs and communicate systems and ideas to a multidisciplinary team

• Good judgement about the cost of false positives and the importance of player trust

• A strong desire to overcome difficult hurdles in an adversarial space where the problem keeps changing

Desirable:

• Experience working with third-party anti-cheat solutions (kernel-level or server-side)

• Experience with SQL, Python or data analysis and visualisation tools

• Experience building or training machine learning models

• Experience working on a live-service or multiplayer FPS

• High-level competitive or ranked experience in FPS titles

Disclaimer:
Anti-cheat work can make you a target for cheat developers and other bad actors. To protect you, this role isn’t public-facing: we won’t publicly identify you as part of the anti-cheat team. Like the rest of the team, you’ll work under strict security measures on your devices and accounts to guard against unwanted contact or attention. Please be aware that this is a security-sensitive role and that these measures are a condition of the job.