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

We’re looking for a Lead or Senior 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.

You’d work alongside one other Unity developer on an unannounced project for PC and consoles, with a new fantasy setting. As with our past work, it has a complex non-linear narrative; in contrast to it, there’s a greater emphasis on non-narrative gameplay.

Whether we’d offer a lead or senior position would depend on skills and experience. From week to week, the main difference would be whether you have responsibility for higher level decisions on matters like system architecture, tooling choices, or risk management.

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. If you’re seeking a lead position, we’d ask that you be familiar with the entire development cycle from pre-production through to launch or post-launch. More than any specific expertise, we’ll need you to be good at learning new things and applying them to novel challenges.

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 strive to avoid 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 out of the last five, 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
• 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 available during our core hours, which are 11:00 to 16:00 UK time. Also, depending on your location, we might need to structure this as a contract position rather than direct employment: we’ve found that the administrative requirements for that can be impractical for a small studio like ours in some jurisdictions.

We typically find that these hours work 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’re also open to sponsoring a UK work visa for this role.

We pay UK 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.

Important Details

• Position type: Full-time
• Length: Permanent
• Location: Remote
• Visa: Sponsorship available
• Application deadline: September 2nd, 2024

How to apply

We are taking open applications for this position until the role is filled. To apply, send us an email by 9:00 BST on Monday 2 September, 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 happy to answer questions, which you can send to jobs@failbettergames.com.