Studio Technical Director & Engineering Leader

Kinetic Games Limited; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid & Flextime Working

Relocation Package (within the UK only

Annual Bonus

Comprehensive Reward Package

Pension Scheme

Health Insurance

30 days Holiday in Total

Training & Development Budget

Southampton FC Tickets

Job summary

Kinetic Games, Southampton-based independent games studio behind Phasmophobia, is seeking a Technical Director to own the studio's technical direction. You will work with the Game Director and programming leads to shape architecture, standards, and long-term strategy while remaining hands-on when needed.

You will lead multiple teams, assess engines and tools, manage technical risks, and ensure scalable, secure multiplayer systems, contributing to delivery across projects and generations of games.

Qualifications

• Significant professional game development experience with senior technical leadership.
• Experience shipping commercially released games on PC and console.
• Strong hands-on programming and software engineering knowledge.
• Understanding of modern game architecture and development pipelines.
• Knowledge of performance, memory, rendering, networking, build systems, tools.
• Ability to communicate complex technical issues to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the studio's overall technical vision and strategy.
• Provide technical leadership to ensure projects have architecture, standards and plans.
• Oversee major technical decisions for long-term maintainability and scalability.
• Identify technical risks early and resolve them with teams.
• Maintain understanding of the technical health of Phasmophobia.
• Establish engineering standards, practices and review processes.
• Review major architectural decisions and challenge where needed.
• Support senior engineers with complex technical problems.
• Ensure performance, stability, networking and platform requirements are met.
• Collaborate across disciplines to align tech with design, art, audio, QA, and production.
• Partner with Production on scope, technical investment and delivery.
• Decide when technical debt should be addressed to reduce long-term risk.
• Evaluate new technologies, engines, middleware and workflows for improvement.
• Help define the technical direction of future Kinetic Games projects.
• Contribute to engineering recruitment and workforce planning.
• Develop Programming Leads and foster a strong engineering culture.
• Ensure back-end multiplayer security and best practices.

Skills

Senior leadership

Hands-on programming

Game development

Performance optimization

Networking systems

Build systems

Multi-team leadership

Communication

Tools

Unity

Unreal Engine

Job description

Kinetic Games, Southampton-based independent games studio behind Phasmophobia, is seeking a Technical Director to own the studio's technical direction. You will work with the Game Director and programming leads to shape architecture, standards, and long-term strategy while remaining hands-on when needed.

You will lead multiple teams, assess engines and tools, manage technical risks, and ensure scalable, secure multiplayer systems, contributing to delivery across projects and generations of games.