Build Engineer Role - AAA Gaming Studio 

(Warrington, Sheffield, Nottingham)

Our AAA Gaming Partner build ground-breaking games and content for some of the world’s biggest publishers including Microsoft, Sony, Apple and Sega. Sheffield is our largest studio and headquarters, situated just north-east of the city centre, where we’ve built and contributed to some of the world’s best-loved game franchises.

It’s an exciting time to be part of their studio, winners of the Develop: Star Awards 2019 Best Studio; big things are on the horizon and we want you to be part of their continued journey.

The role

As a Build Engineer you will be responsible for maintaining the stability of the project builds across all platforms.  You will be responsible for the design and implementation of systems to automate building and testing a title, and for delivering regular builds to QA teams and customers.  You will capable of identifying the cause of any build problems, and for either resolving those problems yourself or communicating with other staff members to help resolve them.  You will be helped in this and report to the lead programmer on the team who will be your line manager.

In a typical day you will be required to maintain systems for existing projects, while developing strategies for improving and automating the build and test processes for existing and future projects.  You know how to use the tools required, including systems and scripting languages for automating building and testing.  You may also have the skills to develop and refine tests to improve the quality of the testing process.  You will have excellent communication skills enabling you to accurately communicate issues and report on the status of the build systems and builds themselves. 

To be successful you will have:

• • Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  • Experience with Jenkins, TeamCity or similar build systems
  • Experience with Maven, Gradle, or similar build management tools
  • A strong understanding of SCCM tools such as Perforce, git or Subversion.
  • A solid understanding of Linux, OSX and Windows Operating Systems
  • Experience in a minimum of one scripting language (Python, Bash, Perl or Ruby)

It would be advantageous if you have:

• • Experience in a range of programming languages (Java, C#, C++)
  • A good time management and self-motivation skills.
  • The ability to take direction and criticism.
  • Knowledge of large-scale asset pipelines.
  • Experience deploying to cloud compute and storage environments
  • Game industry experience, and experience of console build tool chains

What They Offer:

They offer a super benefits package including generous holidays and flexible working hours. Further perks include our legendary annual Big Day Out, plus epic Christmas parties, money on your birthday, on site free gym and free fruit for everyone! Their new, regular studio Game Jams are a highlight - staff spend a full day developing and pitching their own game ideas for possible development.

Their environment is relaxed, friendly and built upon the basis of every team member having the opportunity to shine and have a realisable input into the games we create. We are a very happy ship with lots of incredibly nice people that partake in shared interest groups, lunchtime clubs, charity fundraising events and lots of socialising.

SENIOR PRODUCER (SCHEDULE)

LONDON

Our AAA Gaming Partner is looking to add to its family of permanent staff. They are looking for an exceptionally talented Senior Schedule Producer who is ready for the challenge of producing AAA title on the next generation platforms.

The ‘Senior Schedule Producer’s’ primary role is to ensure we deliver best in class software using high quality scheduling. This role will focus on working across the studio to ensure the integrity of scheduling on the project, tracking the project’s course, developing options to adjust course and communicating project-tracking information. All Senior Producers are clear Leaders and can be both strategic and tactical in developing the team’s ability to evolve to be as competitive as possible. In general, Senior Producers help with steering the projects to success, delivering our games on time, on budget, to a high quality. As with all leadership roles in the Company, the Producer group helps ensure that the Company, the Game, and Team in general, are all doing well. The Senior Schedule Producer reports to the Production Director.

Specific objectives:

Successfully Manages:
• Responsible for working across the studio and with all teams to help the project schedule to be accurate, realistic, high quality and clear to all.
• Responsible for there being ‘no surprises’ with the schedule.
• Responsible for communication of the status of the schedule, team velocity and any schedule challenges to the Project Strategy group.
• Responsible for improving the quality of scheduling across the studio.
• Responsible for working with the studios Production Directors and Production Team to ensure the development team have clear, high quality, realistic, and accurate schedules.
• Responsible for working with the studios teams to analyse their schedules and identify risks, problems and concerns that require resolution.
• Responsible for working with the studios teams Producers and Feature Owners to develop solutions (and options) for schedule concerns.
• Responsible for tracking the studios teams schedules for the phases and project as a whole to gather information and data to aid with option generation and decision-making.
• Working across the studio to help find, track and action plans for dealing with major dependencies that could develop into scheduling issues.
• Responsible for building of metrics around project velocity to gain data on the realities of project progress with the data we have.
• Tracking key phase and milestone deliverables to ensure that the Studio Direction Team are informed over the status of the most important work for the Phase, so that resource and attention can be allocated correctly.
• Accountable for tracking and making visible the status of key phase and milestone deliverables.
• Responsible for analysing and refining Studio and Team Burndowns to aid the prediction of what teams will deliver for a phase and ideally when during that phase.
• Responsible for summarising and communicating project-tracking information to Studio and Production Directors (via reports and meetings) so that informed decisions can be made.
• Accountable for reviewing the studio’s backlogs to push for accurate and consistent data (the basis of analysis) for the course of the project.
• Accountable for providing clear task performance metrics for the development team.
• Consulted on development team task performance.
• Responsible for the analysis of the practices within the studio during a milestone to put forward improvements to process that will result in more focused and consistent delivery.
• Consulted on Project Staffing and Budget to help inform options and strategy on project scheduling across the team.

Shared objectives with the other Senior Producers:
• Be a positive and trusted member of Production
• Projects are completed on time to a high quality
• The right resources are available and are used effectively
• The Team has a clear plan and can execute on it
• Clients are satisfied by the results
• The milestones are completed
• The schedule is achievable and on budget
• Risks are closely managed and mitigated to ensure there are ‘no surprises’

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Expert technical production skills.
• Expert level of proficiency with scheduling large scale video game production projects.
• Keen interest in scheduling and a passion for good processes, project tracking and the software which can be used in project management.
• An excellent understanding of the Office suite i.e. Excel, Word, Project.
• Experience of Jira.

SKILL REQUIREMENTS

• Natural leader.
• Expert scheduling strategies.
• Strong communication skills.
• Experience of Agile methodologies and the ways to track and report on the progress of Agile projects.
• Strong teamwork skills to work with an established team and support them in improving our scheduling.

This role comes with a generous salary and a brilliant benefits package.

SENIOR TOOLS PROGRAMMER – AAA Gaming Studio

London Based

Our AAA gaming partner is looking to add to its family of permanent staff. We are looking for an exceptionally talented senior programmer who is ready for the challenge of producing a AAA title. This role will involve development and maintenance for art and design workflow tools, including the World Editor, procedural LOD generation and more.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the content authoring teams to design efficient and robust workflows.
• Work closely with Engine Team to implement efficient and stable back end for the tools produced.
• Implement content and world creation tool to a high quality.
• Maintain the content and world creation tools and respond to issues quickly.

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Good understanding in C/C++ and software architecture.
• Good understanding of 3D maths and game technology principles.
• An experience in developing efficient asset and world building tools in collaboration with artists and game designers.
• A proven ability to design and implement re-usable systems inside a large code base.
• Worked on at least 1 published title.
• Experience in supporting AAA art & design production workflows an advantage.
• Unreal Engine 3 or 4 experience an advantage.

SKILL REQUIREMENTS

• A passion for playing and developing exceptional games.
• Be a positive, active, and contributing team member.
• To be proactive and helpful with ad-hoc problem solving.
• Must be a team player and know the importance of listening to others.
• Able to work independently, prioritize and handle pressure.
• Must have excellent time management skills to perform in a fast paced, high volume, high-pressure environment.
• Good verbal and written interpersonal and communications skills.