Please note that this role is only available to candidates currently located in Berlin, Germany.

The Lead Writer is responsible for writing leadership on The Conformist. This role defines and maintains the project’s narrative vision in close collaboration with the Creative Director and Game Director, and in coordination with the Senior Narrative Designer. The Lead Writer owns story direction, tone, voice, and thematic coherence, writes a significant portion of the game’s core content, and leads the writing team through clear standards, feedback, and revision. The role ensures that written content is coherent, compelling, and aligned with gameplay systems, player choice, and production realities.

Essential qualifications

• Proven experience as a lead writer or senior writer on narrative-driven games or interactive projects.
• Strong ability to define narrative vision and translate high-level themes into clear, authored content.
• Excellent writing and editing skills, with a consistent command of tone, voice, character intent, and long-form narrative cohesion.
• Demonstrated experience leading, mentoring, and reviewing the work of other writers, including structured feedback and revision workflows.
• Solid understanding of branching narratives and player choice from a writing and authorship perspective.
• Experience collaborating closely with narrative design, game design, production, and technical teams.
• High level of organization and comfort maintaining extensive writing documentation and task tracking.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience working on politically themed or systems-driven narrative games.
• Familiarity with long-term writing development across multi-year production cycles.
• Experience writing within an established fictional universe or shared canon.
• Background in political theory, history, or socially grounded storytelling relevant to The Conformist.
• Lead the writing function for The Conformist, defining narrative direction in collaboration with the Creative Director, Senior Narrative Designer, and Game Director.
• Own the story’s themes, tone, voice, and character intent, ensuring consistency across all narrative content.
• Create and maintain core narrative documentation, including story treatments, act and arc outlines, character bibles, location notes, and narrative pillars.
• Write and oversee major narrative content, including core scenes, dialogue, quests, events, and branching decision structures.
• Guide, review, and edit work from narrative designers and writers, providing clear feedback, revisions, and writing standards.
• Coordinate closely with the Senior Narrative Designer to align narrative structures with writing output and implementation needs.
• Work with game design and systems design to ensure narrative content supports mechanics, reactivity, and meaningful player choice.
• Collaborate with technical teams to support narrative implementation requirements, including variable hooks, state logic, and tooling constraints.
• Review narrative content in implemented builds, addressing pacing, clarity, logic, and flow through iterative rewrites and adjustments.
• Maintain narrative documentation and task tracking using Miro, Notion, and Codecks, keeping materials organized, accessible, and production-ready.

Job benefits

• Health & Wellbeing. Free Urban Sports Club membership for all Berlin-based permanent employees.
• Public Transportation. Fully covered Deutschland-Ticket (BVG) for nationwide public transport.
• Flexible Hours. Start your day between 8:00–10:00 CET with core hours from 10:00–15:00 CET.
• Hybrid Work. We embrace a hybrid work schedule, requiring in-office presence on 3 days, with the flexibility to work remotely for the remaining 2 days of the week (calculation is based on full-time position).
• Work from Abroad. Up to 10 remote work days per year from outside Germany.
• Team Events. Regular team events and access to the NLND community network.
• Feedback & Growth. Regular feedback sessions to support your development.
• Annual Bonus. Performance-based annual bonus.
• Vacation. 24 paid vacation days (full-time).

Compensation

The expected annual gross salary range for this role is approximately 45.000 - 55.000 EUR, depending on experience and qualifications.