Senior Engine Engineer

The entire application process is remote, and we try to keep it short and human. We know interviewing is a big time commitment alongside everything else in your life, so we aim to make decisions as quickly as we can and give you proper feedback either way. 1. Technical interview (45 minutes): An interview with our CTO and one of our senior engineers. This is a proper two-way conversation rather than a whiteboard test: we'll talk through your technical background and how it maps onto the role, and you'll get a clearer picture of how we work, what the day-to-day looks like and the kinds of problems you'd be picking up. 2. Team interview (45 minutes): A more relaxed conversation with a few people from across our team, including from outside engineering. This is where you get a feel for the culture and we get to know you as a person, not just an engineer. We've found this stage matters as much to us as the technical one! We do have a technical code test, but it's predominantly aimed at roles below the senior/principal level. We have conducted personalised tests in the past: for example, a week long deeper test where candidates had some access to the company to work alongside us. If we feel something like that may be useful, we will discuss and agree on the nature of the test with the applicant. Any tests we conduct are fully paid., We work mostly asynchronously, which means real flexibility to shape your hours around the rest of your life: family, hobbies, the school run and those unexpected side-quests in your life. Core hours are 10am-3pm UK time, when everyone's around for meetings and synchronous work. Outside that window, you can work any time between 7am and 9pm UK time. At 10am each day we hold a short team standup. Everyone shares what they're working on and where they're stuck, but it's just as much a social touchpoint as a status check. It's always a nice way to see each other each day and spend some time together. As a remote team, we put real effort into getting together in person too. Every quarter we hold a team day in Leeds for a day of working together and an evening hanging out. Wherever you're based, we'll cover your travel, accommodation and expenses so that you can attend.

• Strong C++ experience is required. Working knowledge of C# and JavaScript/web development is useful, but not necessary.
• Ideally you've shipped code used by a range of different people, so you've experienced first-hand how a wide range of users want and need different things from the same system.
• Ideally you've maintained a codebase over a longer period of time, so you've experienced iterating on your own work over time.
• Unreal experience is desired but not required. You should feel comfortable investigating a variety of engine systems, even if not all of them.
  
  As an Engine Engineer at Cooperative Innovations, your main focus will be working directly on Unreal Engine as part of our ongoing partnership with Epic Games. From time to time, you'll also be working on our internal developer toolkit and original game IP development.
At the core of this role, you'll be working on understanding real engine development problems and solving them. You'll pick up a real problem, get under the hood of the system and figure out what users actually need it to do before you improve or replace it. That means understanding the data: where it lives, what it represents and which transformations make sense in context. The role is problem solving. From simple, one line change fixes to "how do we rework a system to scale" problems. Some seemingly trivial, some larger challenges. While this is an "AI-in-the-loop" role, your judgement and experience are what matter most. AI is there to automate experiments and accelerate the work where that is justified, not to make the calls. The real context, judgement and expertise come from you. You won't be doing any of this alone. You'll work as part of a small team of engineers, working collaboratively, discussing and drawing on each other's experience to land on pragmatic solutions. The goal is finding the right answer to the problem in front of you; and understanding the context well enough to know what that looks like is where you come in. Culturally, we aim for everyone to be comfortable asking the "silly" questions. Everyone should feel relaxed and safe raising any question, rather than assuming any one particular idea or approach is the way. At times, those seemingly silly questions can be really important. We're looking for people at both the Senior and Principal level. We define Senior as being willing to take on a feature from the start to successfully shipped. Principal is about going further: having the experience and instincts to think about the wider implications of how a feature should work and why. For example: "What are the limitations to scaling?" "How will it work on limited hardware?" "What hasn't been considered?", Cooperative Innovations, (or "Coop", as we call ourselves) is a game technology studio founded in 2016. We build games, tools and Unreal Engine systems for teams creating interactive experiences. We work closely with studios, creators and partners at every stage of their development process We're a small, multi-disciplinary team of T-shaped creative people, covering Programming, Production, Technical Design, QA and Operations. Small enough that you'll get to know everyone well, big enough that there's real depth of experience to draw on. We know first-hand where development friction exists, because we've lived it through our own game development projects. That experience has shaped the tools we've built to solve our problems and now powers the products and services we share with others, including KERNL, our toolkit for development teams and creators. Our people matter to us. We put great care into how the studio runs day-to-day - how we communicate, how we make decisions, how we look after each other - and we're proud of the team culture we maintain at Coop. It's something we'd want you to feel from the first conversation with us.