Lead Game Engineer

Important:

Location: Must be based in the UK or Europe. Respectuflly, applicants outside these regions will not be considered.

Visa Sponsorship: Not available at this time. Applicants must be eligible to work in their current country of residence.

Application Requirements: Submit your CV in .pdf format only.

Right to work: If an offer of employment is made to you, you will need to produce a piece of valid ID to prove your right to work.

Confirmation email: Please note that not receiving a confirmation email post-application is normal, and just a quirk of our application system - your application has been received :)

Timeframe: The role will stay open for applicants for a minimum of 1.5 weeks. As a rough guideline, we endeavour to get back to all applicants within 2 weeks.

About Us: Since 2015, ZA/UM Studio has been at the forefront of artistic achievement within the video games industry. Driven by a commitment to video games as an art form and endless intellectual curiosity, we are now a studio with a portfolio of projects and a global team of over 80 people.

We are committed to creating narrative-driven games that challenge the boundaries of art and storytelling. We do not shy away from social commentary or challenging industry conventions. The foundation of our artistic pursuits is collective creativity, we view teamwork and camaraderie as essential.

Role:

We are looking for a lead game engineer to join one of our exciting unannounced Unity-based game projects, where they would manage a small team of programmers and report directly to the project technical director. They would work closely with other discipline and feature team leads to make sure we are supporting game loop functionality, content creation pipelines, underlying technical systems, UI implementation, and that it all runs cleanly and smoothly.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with project producers, feature team owners and directors to plan and execute programming work with a small team of engineers.
• Manage the well-being, work and processes of the engineers that report to you.
• Work with production to review and update the Jira backlog.
• Work with the technical director to balance workloads between team members, sprints and milestones.
• Host meeting ceremonies and engineering touch-points.
• Find and address dependencies between features and teams.
• Communicate well with stakeholders and keep them informed.
• Share information and technology with other ZA/UM projects.
• Take a key role in the code review process.
• Maintain the health and stability of the project builds.
• Partake in robust and performant coding work of features when project and managerial duties permit.
• To share expertise with technical and non-technical team members
• Maintaining specialisation in Unity and C#
• Documenting and communicating updates, new technologies and findings
• Providing technical feedback and solution suggestions to technical issues
  

Skills & requirements

• Experience of the full life-cycle of game development
• Great communication skills with both technical and non-technical personnel
• You are professional, considerate, and a supportive team player
• You understand game project development and its requirements
• Experience with developing in Unity with at least 5 years working as a programmer in the video games industry.
• Experience in leading and mentoring other programmers.
• Substantial experience working in C# and object-oriented programming
• Self motivation and proactive learning
• Works well in a remote environment
• Experienced in profiling and optimisation
• Organisational skills to balance the needs of multiple customers

Bonuses

• Experience working on multiple platforms, including console, PC and macOS
• You are a fan of narrative and artistic games

We Offer:

• Competitive salary - Living Wage Accredited employer
• Excellent career development opportunities in a rapidly growing company.
• Flexible hybrid work model - the ability to work remotely or from the office, with occasional required in person meetings.
• Private medical and dental cover
• Studio closure over Christmas
• Industry-leading parental leave policies and childcare support.
• Childcare support
• Personal annual learning and development budget

ZA/UM is committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion among our workforce, and eliminating unlawful discrimination. The aim is for our workforce to be truly representative of all sections of society and our customers, and for each employee to feel respected and able to give their best. The organisation - in providing goods and/or services and/or facilities - is also committed against unlawful discrimination of customers or the public.