Senior Gameplay and Animation Engineer in Hove

Department: Engineering

Location(s): Brighton (preferred), Brno, Prague

Reports To: Lead engineer

Job Type: Permanent

Who We Are: Home to the award-winning Mafia franchise, our team are united by passion for rich narrative storytelling, cinematic presentation and AAA craft. We're looking for creative minds and driven professionals who share our love of story, style, and adventure. If you're ready to help shape the next generation of narrative-driven games, we'd love to hear from you.

Job Summary: As a Senior Gameplay & Animation Engineer you will set a high bar for code quality and a passion for gameplay and animation. In this role, you will own and continue the development of our key gameplay and animation systems, you will extend and maintain the code of our technology, tools, and pipelines, working closely with the animators, character artists, designers, and programmers to help develop spectacular gameplay features for our games.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work within Unreal Engine 5 adapting existing systems and building new technology to fulfil the project's technical needs and creativity.
• Prototyping and coding gameplay and animation features.
• Work closely and constructively with design, animation, and engineering teams to realise creative ambitions.
• Support planning efforts by estimating and dependency checking gameplay feature development.
• Identify technical and developmental risks/obstacles and generate solutions to overcome identified risks.
• Research coding techniques and algorithms in order to keep current on technological developments and advancements in the game industry.

Essential Skills, Attributes and Experience:

• Demonstrable programming experience in a creative environment.
• Shipped one or more AAA game titles, ideally using Unreal Engine.
• Advanced proficiency in C++, linear algebra, 3D Maths and strong familiarity with Object-Oriented (OO) design principles.
• Experience with GAS - the Unreal Gameplay Ability System.
• Unreal Engine, Blueprints and Unreal Animation Principles.
• Dedication to code quality and documentation, and ability to learn and master new technologies and code.
• Ability to work independently and efficiently under deadlines.
• Effective communicator and collaborator with multi-disciplinary team members.

Highly Desirable:

• Hands-on experience developing for Unreal Engine and Xbox Series X/S and PS5.
• Experience with player controlled characters, Unreal enhanced inputs, cameras and camera systems.
• Implementation experience in one or more of the following areas: Inverse Kinematics techniques, Ragdoll and physics-based character animation, Procedural animation techniques, Keyframe animation and forward kinematics, Machine learning driven animation techniques.

Hangar 13 prides itself on the diversity of its team members, partners, and communities. For this reason, we remain committed to providing equal employment opportunity in all aspects of the employment relationship, from recruitment and hiring through compensation, benefits, discipline and termination. As an equal opportunity employer, we are also committed to ensuring that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation(s) to participate in the job application and/or interview process, to perform their essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us if you need to request reasonable accommodation.

SECURITY NOTICE: We have recently been made aware of increasing occurrences of bad actors posing as company HR personnel to gain information from potential candidates, in the form of job interviews and offers. These scams can be quite sophisticated and appear legitimate. Please know that Hangar 13 and 2K never use instant messaging apps to contact prospective employees or to conduct interviews. If you believe you have been a victim of such a scam, you may fill out a complaint form detailing as much as possible. We are taking these matters very seriously and apologise for any inconvenience.