Engine Programmer Intern: Serialization Systems

Epic Games; Greater London; On-site; GBP 13,000 - 20,000; Full time

Job summary

Epic Games is seeking an Engine Programmer Intern to join the Unreal Engine team, focusing on a new schema-based serialization system that handles save, load, and versioning. You will own a feature within the serialization stack and work with engineering leads and cross-team partners to ship core tech used by millions of players and creators.

You’ll contribute high-performance C++ for memory‑constrained, backwards‑compatible systems, build tooling for serialized data, and develop robust unit

Qualifications

• Strong C++ fundamentals with memory management and pointers.
• Solid understanding of data structures and how data is laid out in memory.
• Interest in low-level systems programming—file formats, binary data, compilers, or engine internals.
• A rigorous, detail‑oriented approach to work.
• Comfort with debugging unfamiliar code and tracing root causes.
• Ability to explain technical designs and ask good questions.
• Self-driven, eager to learn and open to feedback.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement a feature within the serialization stack, from proposal to shipped code with guidance from the engineering lead.
• Write high-performance, memory-efficient C++ for systems where correctness and backwards compatibility are critical.
• Build tooling that helps users work with serialized data, such as diffing, visualization, and human-readable text formats.
• Develop thorough unit tests to guarantee data integrity across save, load, and version-upgrade paths.
• Collaborate with partner teams across the engine to integrate the serialization system with their data and workflows.
• Participate in code reviews and design discussions to learn how core engine technology is built and maintained at scale.

Skills

C++ fundamentals

Memory management

Pointers

Templates basics

Data structures

Low-level systems

Debugging

Communication

Job description

Epic Games is seeking an Engine Programmer Intern to join the Unreal Engine team, focusing on a new schema-based serialization system that handles save, load, and versioning. You will own a feature within the serialization stack and work with engineering leads and cross-team partners to ship core tech used by millions of players and creators.

You’ll contribute high-performance C++ for memory‑constrained, backwards‑compatible systems, build tooling for serialized data, and develop robust unit