Senior Programmer

Company Description Huey Games Ltd specializes in smart porting solutions powered by HueyCore™ for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and VR platforms. The company supports game studios with co-development, porting, multiplayer implementation, and design consulting. Potential team members can expect to work with diverse partners across the games industry and contribute to high-quality releases on multiple platforms. We also create and publish our own IP.

Behind the shipping work is HueyCore™, our proprietary porting backend, and PortAll™, our client-facing dashboard. We are now investing significantly in AI-assisted tooling to strengthen those platforms and the services we build on top of them.

Role Description This is a full-time, 12 month fixed-term remote or hybrid Senior Programmer role for an exciting new technical R&D project, working alongside our Principal Programmer and a dedicated partner organisation which specialises in machine learning. The work is delivered across eight work packages over 12 months (January – December 2027), with a core project team of six.

The Senior Programmer will be a hands-on engineer delivering the bulk of the production code across the project, working under the technical direction of the Principal Programmer. The role sits at the point where machine-learning outputs from our partner organisation meet real game codebases and real target hardware. Day-to-day work includes implementing the integration layer between the ML tooling and our existing HueyCore™ pipeline, building the performance analysis and optimisation guidance components that surface the project’s findings to end users, running platform-specific profiling and benchmarking against a range of console and PC hardware, and working closely with our ML partner on data pipelines, telemetry formats, and model integration. The Senior Programmer will also contribute to beta-partner validation work in the back half of the project, supporting external studios as they trial the tools against their own titles.

Key Responsibilities

• Deliver production-quality code across the R&D project’s eight work packages, under the technical direction of the Principal Programmer.
• Build the integration between the machine-learning tooling delivered by our partner organisation and the HueyCore™ porting pipeline.
• Implement the performance analysis and optimisation guidance components that form the user-facing output of the project.
• Run platform-specific profiling and benchmarking across PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC and VR hardware. Produce clean, reproducible performance data.
• Work closely with the ML partner’s engineers on telemetry formats, data pipelines, and model integration.
• Contribute to the beta-partner validation phase - supporting external studios trialling the tools against their own game codebases.
• Contribute to technical documentation, code reviews, and the project’s IP and dissemination deliverables.
• Operate cleanly within the project’s Jira / Confluence / GitHub workflow, with the reporting hygiene that an externally funded R&D project requires.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong C++ programming experience, with a track record of shipped work. Comfortable in large, mature codebases.
• Hands-on experience of games-platform development on one or more of PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC or VR. Ability to work across multiple platforms is a strong plus.
• Demonstrable experience of performance analysis, profiling and optimisation on console or PC hardware.
• Hands-on comfort with Jira, Confluence, GitHub and modern code review and CI practice.
• Strong written and verbal communication - this is an R&D project with a substantial reporting bar, and you’ll need to be able to write up your own technical work cleanly.
• Right to work in the UK.

Desirable

• Experience of a prior externally funded R&D delivery.
• Familiarity with machine-learning pipelines, telemetry capture, or working alongside ML engineers. You don’t need to be an ML engineer yourself, but comfort at the integration seam helps.
• Experience of engine-level work in Unity, Unreal, or a proprietary engine.
• Experience of shipping to first-party platform certification (TRC / XR / lotcheck).
• Games-industry experience in a studio or porting-house setting.