Senior Principal Software Engineer — Desktop Platform

Nexus Mods; Exeter; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4-day week

£25 monthly game allowance

Employee Assistance Programme

Private BUPA health insurance

Flexible training budget

Social events

Job summary

Nexus Mods in Exeter seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead the App Engineering team behind Vortex, our flagship desktop mod manager used by millions. You’ll write production code, shape architecture, and mentor others while solving deep systems problems, performance, and cross‑platform integration.

You’ll own the hardest bugs, drive architectural decisions across teams, review code, and steward a public extension API for a lively third‑party ecosystem.

Qualifications

• Extensive senior experience building substantial production systems (desktop or gaming tooling)
• Strong TypeScript/JavaScript in production
• Real Electron experience: main/renderer, packaging, code signing, cross‑platform quirks
• Experience designing public APIs or SDKs for external developers
• Track record of mentoring engineers and lifting the technical level of teams

Responsibilities

• Ship high‑impact work across the Electron main process, renderer, and extension layers
• Own the hardest bugs: race conditions, performance regressions, state issues
• Drive architecture decisions that span multiple teams, in partnership with engineering management
• Review code and set technical standards through example
• Mentor engineers across levels in Electron, React, TypeScript, and the modding domain
• Steward a public extension API used by an active third‑party developer community
• Identify and pay down technical debt in a large, long‑lived codebase
• Work with Product, Design, QA, Community, and Backend to turn ambiguous problems into shipped features
• Improve build, packaging, and release tooling for the whole team

Skills

TypeScript

JavaScript

React

Electron

Node.js

API design

Mentoring

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Code signing

Packaging

Job description

Nexus Mods in Exeter seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead the App Engineering team behind Vortex, our flagship desktop mod manager used by millions. You’ll write production code, shape architecture, and mentor others while solving deep systems problems, performance, and cross‑platform integration.

You’ll own the hardest bugs, drive architectural decisions across teams, review code, and steward a public extension API for a lively third‑party ecosystem.