We’re Failbetter Games, an award-winning game development studio and makers of Sunless Sea, Sunless Skies and Fallen London. We’re known for inventive narrative design, hand-crafted worlds and rich, atmospheric storytelling.

We’re looking for a Lead Unity Developer to join our small in-house team. This position is permanent, remote, and full time, which for us means 35 hours a week.

About the Role

This is primarily a development role, best suited to someone who’d like to directly apply their skill and expertise to projects, rather than transition into management. You’ll spend much of your time directly implementing or improving features, often in collaboration with designers, writers, and artists. The specific work is very varied – we’re a small studio with a tendency to move between genres. There’ll be plenty of the standard video game development challenges, but also some unusual ones, like a storycrafting mechanic that employs the Wave Function Collapse algorithm.

As our Unity lead, we’ll also look to you for high-level technical decisions on all our Unity projects: things like system architecture, tooling choices, or identifying areas of risk that need to be investigated during pre-production. Our team currently has two Unity developers; you’ll share your knowledge and expertise with them, and assist with their skill development.

Skills and Requirements

You don’t need a particular degree nor some arbitrary number of shipped titles or years’ experience to work for us. As long as you’re able to do the job well and can demonstrate that in your application, we’d love to hear from you.

For this role, that will mean significant breadth of knowledge and expertise in the use of Unity for game development. We’d ask that you be familiar with the entire development cycle from pre-production through to launch or post-launch. And more than any specific expertise, we’ll need you to be good at learning new things and constructing good solutions to unfamiliar problems.

As an example, we wouldn’t necessarily expect you to have worked with Addressables – but given time to investigate, we’d hope you could make a well reasoned recommendation as to whether we should use them for a particular project, and identify what steps we’d need to take to do a good job of that.

We make games for PC, Xbox, Switch, and PlayStation, so experience developing for most or all of these platforms would be valuable, but it’s very much not essential for the role: if for instance you’ve only developed for PC but think you’d otherwise be a good fit, we’d be glad to hear from you.

What we can offer

Failbetter is committed to offering employees a safe, respectful environment, a healthy work-life balance, and transparent decision-making. We make our games without crunch and enthusiastically eliminate systemic sources of overtime. We don’t talk over one another in meetings, and we don’t expect all our employees to share the same hobbies and cultural references. We’ve won a GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work award four years in a row since 2019, as well as their Diversity Award in 2022.

Further benefits of working here include:

• Flexible start times, and strong support for other forms of flexible working, like compressed hours
• Employer pension contributions
• Twenty-five days of leave in addition to UK public holidays
• Excellent provisions for parental leave
• Free games from our friends in the industry
• Optional multiplayer gaming and virtual hangouts
• Periodic consultations in which we invite subject matter experts to teach us about topics relevant to our work
• An annual, expenses-paid trip to a scenic part of the UK for our company gathering

Remote Work

The entire team is remote, and we expect to remain that way.

Our studio is based in the United Kingdom, but you don’t have to be. However, we do require that you be able to work our core hours, which are 11:00 to 16:00 UTC.

We typically find that this arrangement works best for people who live no more than three time zones away from the UK. If you think your personal circumstances might make you an exception, please explain why in your cover letter.

We pay London salaries; whether that works in your favour will depend on your location. In particular, this means that our positions are usually not a good fit for people working from the United States, due to the differences in cost of living and health care.

How to apply

We are taking open applications for this position until the role is filled. To apply, contact us at jobs at failbetter dot com, including all of the following:

• The role you’re applying for, in the subject line of your email.
• A cover letter in the body of your email. Please use this to let us know what you think may make you a good fit for the position and why it interests you. If your timezone is more than three hours away from the UK’s, please also tell us about any circumstances that would nonetheless make our core hours practical for you.
• A CV.

If you’re unsure whether to apply, we’re very happy to answer questions, which you can send to the above email address.