Senior Rendering Engineer

Glowmade; Guildford; On-site; GBP 35,000 - 55,000; Full time

Job description

Hello, we’re Glowmade! We’re a small, exciting company and the goal of our games is to unlock people's imagination and help them express themselves in wonderful, fun ways. Right now we’re busy building a new multiplayer cooperative game with an ambitious creative wrapper around it. We can’t say too much, but if you can imagine Jim Henson’s Labyrinth mashed up with Wrestlemania, then you’ll be on the right track!

This is an opportunity to play a crucial role in our small but efficient code team. Reporting to Jonny Hopper (Co-Founder, Technical Director), you’ll be working closely with him and Adam Sibbick (Art Director) to make our game beautiful. We need shaders! We need performance! We need the box of clever tricks hidden inside your wizard coat. And we need it all in our home-grown close-to-the-metal engine.

Coding Workflow

We use C++ for the majority of our dev work, but it is often more data-oriented than object-oriented. No complex inheritance hierarchies, template metaprogramming or bleeding edge features that add compile time and reduce readability. We'll still use any feature that makes dev easier, but not at the cost of expensive code maintenance or excessive compilation time.

We use external libraries where appropriate, but where there isn’t one available, for reasons of speed, robustness or feature set, we will roll our own. This lets us concentrate on the features and toolsets our asset creators genuinely need, keeping development as friction free as we can make it:

• The entire codebase builds for debug in under 4 minutes and a single code file change will rebuild in under 5 seconds.
• Rebuilding assets, including all shaders, takes around 25 minutes and it's a rare occasion that rebuilding from scratch is required.
• Hot reloading means you only occasionally have to restart the game when game assets or data are updated.

Don't believe this is possible... Our Senior Tools Programmer Kev said on his first day "Gosh. That was such a relief after years of bloody Unreal. 20 minutes and everything's built and the game is running. I love it!"

These are all times we’d like to lower and “rare occasions” we’d love to turn into “nevers”. Maybe you can help!

Requirements

From day one we would like you to...

• Think creatively about how to push the game’s visual bar and blow our minds.
• Enthusiastically jump into our existing codebase and take ownership over key graphics and pipeline features.
• Work closely with Adam, our Art Director, to deliver on the game’s visual direction.

In six months you will be...

• Pivotal to the success of the game, having specced and delivered key visual and pipeline technology.
• A central, supportive member of our small team.

The ideal candidate would…

• Have 5 + years' experience as a Rendering Engineer.
• Have a deep love of real-time graphics.
• Know lots about performance tuning and optimisation.
• Come armed with a strong technical background, where your intuition to the ‘what’ is backed up by the ‘why’.
• Show willingness to do all the things, in order to Get Them Done.
• Be at C++ Level: Brilliant, but not so Brilliant you use template metaprogramming, traits and std::range all the time.

Advantageous qualities

• An artistic eye married with an ability to express that in code.
• Shipped a game as part of a team.
• Experience delivering a cross-platform project.
• Not super-fussed about Object Oriented design.

Benefits

• Private Medical Cover.
• Weekly PT Sessions.
• 20 days base PLUS we shut the studio from Christmas eve to New Year's bank holiday inclusive.
• Accrue extra holiday days per year of employment: 1 additional day of holiday on the 1 Jan following your first full year of work then 1 further day of holiday every 2 years.
• 3x Wellbeing Days per year: Emergency