Best platforms to find an indie job

Most job board advice for game devs is written by people who've never shipped a game or hired anyone. They list LinkedIn, Indeed, and ArtStation, and call it a day. That's useless if you're trying to land your first paid indie game job, because indie studios mostly don't recruit through those channels. They hire through Discord servers, Twitter threads, jam connections, and a handful of niche platforms.

I've watched dozens of devs break in over the last few years. The pattern is consistent: the ones who get hired fastest pick two or three platforms, go deep, and treat job hunting like a portfolio project. The ones who spray applications across fifty job boards get ghosted.

Here's the honest breakdown of where to actually look, what each platform is good for, and which ones to skip.

Platforms built specifically for indie game work

Generic job boards optimize for big employers with big budgets. Indie studios with five people and a Kickstarter don't post on Indeed. They post where indie devs already hang out, or on platforms that filter for indie scale.

Crewforge

I'll be upfront: you're reading this on Crewforge. But the reason this platform exists is that no one was solving the matching problem properly for indie. You can browse open roles at indie studios that are actively shipping games, filter by stack (Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker), discipline, and remote preference, then apply with your portfolio attached. The filter for engine and discipline matters more than it sounds. Half the friction on generic boards is reading through twenty postings that turn out to be AAA mobile gacha studios mislabeled as indie.

It's also worth checking the studio side. You can look through indie studios shipping right now and see who's working on what before they post a role. Cold outreach to a studio whose game you actually played hits harder than any application form.

Work With Indies

A curated job board that's been around for a while and explicitly filters for indie-scale studios. Postings tend to be contract or full-time roles at small teams. The volume is lower than mass boards, which is the point. Signal is high. If you're a generalist programmer or 2D artist, this is one of the first places to look.

Hitmarker

Broader games industry focus, not strictly indie, but the filtering is decent and indie postings show up regularly. Useful if you're open to AA or live-service work alongside indie, because the same skills often translate. Don't rely on it alone though, because most indie postings here are from studios big enough to have an HR person.

Community-driven channels that punch above their weight

This is where most first jobs actually happen. Not through formal applications, but through someone in a server saying "hey, my friend's team needs a sound designer next month, you free?"

Discord servers

The single highest-ROI channel for indie work, and almost no one talks about it as a job search strategy. The relevant servers depend on your discipline:

• The Game Dev League, large general server with job channels.
• Unity and Unreal Source official Discords have hiring channels.
• Godot community Discord, especially relevant as Godot adoption keeps climbing post-Unity-pricing-fiasco.
• Genre-specific servers like the roguelike dev community, VN dev servers, or solo dev hubs where small teams post when they need help.

The rule on Discord: lurk first, contribute second, look for work third. Servers can smell a one-week-old account asking for a job. Build a presence by helping people debug, sharing your work-in-progress, and being useful for a month or two before you start fishing for gigs.

Twitter / X and Bluesky

The indie dev community lives on these platforms despite the platform drama. Studios post openings, often informally, in the replies of "who's looking for work?" threads that go around regularly. Following the dev hashtags (#screenshotsaturday, #gamedev, #indiedev) and showing your work publicly does double duty: it's a portfolio AND a job search.

Bluesky has gained real traction with indie devs over the past year. The audience is smaller but more engaged, and there's less algorithmic noise drowning out posts. Worth being on both.

itch.io community and game jams

Game jams aren't job boards, but they function like one. The Global Game Jam, Ludum Dare, and themed jams like the GMTK Game Jam are where small teams form, test each other, and often turn into longer collaborations. I know at least four devs who got their first paid contract because they jammed with someone who later got funded and hired the team back.

Where to skip (and why)

Some platforms eat your time and give back nothing. Save yourself the cycles.

LinkedIn (mostly)

LinkedIn is fine if you want to work at Ubisoft or EA. It's mostly noise for indie. The studios that post there have HR departments and ATS systems that filter out anyone without a CS degree or three shipped titles. If you have those credentials, sure, use it. If you're trying to land your first paid gig at a five-person team, LinkedIn is the wrong room.

Generic freelance platforms

Upwork and Fiverr have race-to-the-bottom pricing for game work. You'll be competing with people charging $5 for pixel art commissions. The clients are rarely indie studios with funding, more often people with a "game idea" and no budget. If you need cash flow while you find real work, fine. As a path to a sustainable indie career, it's a dead end.

Reddit job threads

r/gameDevClassifieds and r/INAT (I Need A Team) are dominated by unpaid "rev-share" offers from solo creators with no portfolio. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal. Every once in a while a real paid gig appears, but you'll wade through forty "join my JRPG, will pay when we sell" posts to find it. Set up a keyword alert if you must, but don't make it your primary channel.

How to actually get hired once you've found the platform

Finding the listing is the easy part. Most devs lose the game at the application stage by treating it like a corporate job application.

Lead with the work, not the resume

Indie studios hire on demonstrated skill. A two-person team doesn't have time to train you. They want to see something you made that's close to what they need. If the role is for a tools programmer on a Unity project, send a link to a tool you built in Unity. If it's character art for a stylized 3D game, send the three pieces in your portfolio that are closest to their style, not your entire ArtStation.

The single best thing you can do is play their game (or watch a trailer if it's not out) and reference something specific in your application. "I noticed your combat has a parry window and I've been working on input buffering systems, here's a prototype" beats "I am passionate about games" every time.

Make the smallest possible thing that proves you can do the job

If you have no shipped credits, the fastest way in is to build a tiny, polished thing that directly maps to the kind of work you want. A one-screen vertical slice. A single character with full animation states. A working dialogue system as a Unity package. Polish beats scope at this stage. Hiring managers (often the founder themselves) will spend ninety seconds on your portfolio. Make those ninety seconds count.

Apply to fewer roles, more carefully

Ten tailored applications beat a hundred copy-pasted ones. Indie studios talk to each other. If you mass-spray, word gets around. If you apply thoughtfully to a studio making a game you actually care about, you stand out instantly because most applicants don't.

Building the channels before you need them

The devs who get hired fastest started building their network six months before they needed a job. You can shortcut this if you start now.

Ship something public, even if it's small

A jam game on itch with twenty downloads is infinitely more useful than a half-finished "dream project" on your hard drive. Hiring managers want to see that you finish things. The bar for "shipped" in indie is low: a playable jam build counts.

Be findable

Have one consolidated portfolio link. Have a Twitter or Bluesky with your work pinned. Have a profile on the platforms you're applying through, filled out properly, with a clear list of what you do and what engines you work in. Half the devs I see complain about not getting hired have portfolios that take three clicks to find their actual work.

Talk to other devs at your level

Your peers will get hired before the senior devs you're trying to impress, and they'll refer you. Be useful in communities. Help someone debug their shader. Playtest someone's prototype and give real feedback. Six months of that compounds into a network that surfaces job leads before they ever hit a public board.

Pick two platforms this week and go deep

Don't try to be on everything. Pick one structured platform (Crewforge, Work With Indies, or Hitmarker) and one community channel (a Discord that matches your discipline, or active presence on Bluesky/Twitter). Spend the next thirty days posting work, helping people, and applying to three roles a week with tailored applications.

That's the playbook. The devs who follow it land paid work in two to three months. The devs who treat job hunting as filling out forms on LinkedIn stay unemployed for a year and blame the industry.

Go open a tab, find one role today that fits what you do, and write the application before you close it.