Porting Engineer
UK Remote or West Midlands-based / Full-Time Contractor
Please note: We welcome applicants who prefer to work from home; however, we cannot offer visa sponsorship for this opportunity at this time.
Role Overview
As an Experienced Console Porting Engineer, you will be responsible for bringing existing PC and current generation console titles built within Unreal Engine 5 to lower powered console hardware. You will be optimising games to meet platform specific performance, memory, and technical requirements, while maintaining gameplay parity and player experience and integrating support for platform specific features and hardware capabilties.
You will work closely with UI, design, technical art, QA, and production teams to solve technical challenges and deliver high-quality, compliant releases that meet performance and certification requirements. This role requires a pragmatic and highly analytical engineer who can balance visual quality, performance, memory usage, storage constraints, and development effort to deliver high-quality ports.
As a senior member of the team, you will be in direct contact with client teams and external development partners. You will communicate technical strategies, progress, risks, and implementation decisions throughout development, helping to build strong working relationships and ensure successful project delivery.
Key Responsibilities
1. Game Development
- Analyse existing game systems and identify areas requiring adaptation, optimisation, or reimplementation for lower powered console hardware.
- Modify and extend engine, gameplay, rendering, UI, and platform systems to meet performance, memory, storage, and platform specific requirements.
- Work closely with content teams to identify assets, systems, and features requiring optimisation while preserving the intended player experience.
- Integrate and maintain platform specific functionality including input systems, save systems, achievements, user accounts, and platform services.
- Support the delivery of feature complete ports while minimising gameplay, visual, and functional differences from the original release.
2. Technical Problem Solving
- Investigate, diagnose, and resolve platform specific issues relating to performance, memory usage, asset streaming, loading times, stability, and compatibility.
- Develop practical solutions for hardware limitations while maintaining quality and gameplay consistency.
- Collaborate directly with client engineering and technical leadership teams to review technical requirements, discuss implementation approaches, and resolve development challenges.
- Identify technical risks throughout the porting process and work with internal and external stakeholders to develop mitigation plans.
- Present technical findings, performance analysis, optimisation plans, and project risks to both internal teams and external partners.
3. Code Optimisation
- Profile and optimise CPU, GPU, memory, storage, and asset streaming performance to achieve platform performance targets.
- Identify bottlenecks across engine, gameplay, rendering, animation, physics, and content systems and implement effective optimisation solutions.
- Assess the use of advanced Unreal Engine 5 rendering technologies such as Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM), Virtual Texturing, and post-processing systems, adapting or replacing them where necessary to meet platform performance and memory targets.
- Reduce memory footprint through asset optimisation, data layout improvements, streaming enhancements, and runtime memory management techniques.
- Optimise loading times, world streaming, asset loading, content streaming systems, and storage access patterns to ensure stable performance, memory usage and overall user experience.
- Work with art and technical art teams to establish realistic performance budgets and content optimisation strategies.
- Utilise platform profiling and debugging tools to identify inefficient code paths, excessive resource usage, and performance regressions.
4. Technical Documentation
- Document platform-specific architecture, optimisation workflows, memory budgets, technical requirements, and implementation guidelines.
- Create and maintain technical documentation covering porting approaches, performance targets, development processes, and best practices.
- Produce client-facing technical reports, optimisation summaries, risk assessments, and development status updates.
- Support other engineers in understanding platform limitations, optimisation strategies, and technical implementation details.
5. Quality Assurance and Testing
- Debug and test game systems across multiple hardware configurations and operating modes to identify and resolve technical issues.
- Work closely with QA teams to reproduce, investigate, and resolve platform-specific defects and performance issues.
- Support platform compliance, certification preparation, and technical requirement validation throughout development.
- Ensure gameplay systems, visual presentation, performance, and platform functionality meet established quality standards.
- Monitor and address regressions throughout development to ensure a stable and polished final release.
6. Client Collaboration
- Act as a technical contact for clients, publishers, and external development partners throughout the porting process.
- Provide regular updates on technical progress, optimisation efforts, project risks, and platform-specific challenges.
- Collaborate with client engineering teams to review existing implementations, align on technical approaches, and resolve cross-team development issues.
- Present performance findings, memory analysis, technical recommendations, and project status updates to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Build strong and trusted working relationships with client teams while balancing technical constraints, project objectives, and delivery timelines.
7. Continuous Learning and Innovation
- Stay current with evolving console hardware capabilities, platform SDKs, optimisation techniques, and development best practices.
- Evaluate new tools, workflows, and technologies that improve porting efficiency, build stability, and platform performance.
- Identify opportunities to streamline porting processes and improve development efficiency across future projects.
8. Guidance
- Assist the growth of junior engineers in console development, optimisation techniques, debugging methodologies, and performance-focused engineering practices.
- Champion code quality, maintainability, stability, and technical excellence throughout development.
- Provide technical leadership on optimisation strategy, platform adaptation, and performance planning.
- Support project planning and estimation activities by identifying technical complexity, risks, and dependencies.
Qualifications and Skills
- Experience contributing significantly to the development, optimisation, or shipment of console game ports built with Unreal Engine 5.
- Strong proficiency in C++ with a focus on high-performance, low-level systems development.
- Experience adapting visually demanding Unreal Engine 5 titles for platforms with constrained CPU, GPU, memory, and bandwidth budgets, including evaluating, reconfiguring, or replacing advanced UE5 rendering technologies where required.
- Experience working with Unreal Engine 5 large world technologies, including World Partition, streaming systems, and HLOD workflows.
- Strong understanding of software architecture, platform abstraction, and performance-focused development methodologies.
- Deep understanding of memory management, asset streaming, storage systems, content scalability, and optimisation techniques.
- Experience working within Unreal Engine, proprietary engines, or other modern game engines in a cross-platform development environment.
- Strong knowledge of rendering, gameplay, animation, physics, UI, audio, and content systems, and their impact on performance and memory budgets.
- Experience profiling and optimising CPU, GPU, memory, storage, and loading performance using platform-specific debugging and analysis tools.
- Experience implementing and maintaining platform-specific functionality, services, and integrations.
- Familiarity with platform SDKs, certification processes, technical requirements, and console development workflows.
- Strong understanding of asynchronous and multi-threaded systems, streaming architectures, memory budgeting, and runtime performance monitoring.
- Demonstrated ability to identify technical risks and deliver effective solutions within hardware and platform constraints.
- Experience working directly with clients, publishers, or external development partners throughout the game development lifecycle.
- Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to explain technical challenges, risks, and solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience presenting technical solutions, development progress, performance analysis, and project recommendations during client-facing meetings.
- Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with meticulous attention to detail for performance, stability, scalability, and user experience.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, art, design, QA, production, and external client teams.
- Passion for delivering high-quality game experiences across a wide range of hardware platforms.
What We Offer:
Based just outside Birmingham, Flix is made up of welcoming, passionate, active gamers that support one another in all aspects of development. We offer you to:
- Join a friendly, nurturing work environment with the opportunity to build games as part of an extremely talented, ambitious studio.
- Work on market-leading AAA titles and IP with globally reputable studio and publisher partners.
- Be part of a sustainably growing game developer studio as we consciously expand our team and projects on a case-by-case basis.
- Learn within an independent studio across a wide range of projects and opportunities both internal and external.
Application:
Please send through your portfolio and cover letter. If your examples are from previous works with another studio, please make sure samples are cleared for release by copyright owners. Links to an online portfolio are preferable, otherwise we accept showreels via Dropbox or other secure sharing platforms.
Send your application to – careers@flixinteractive.com
If you love making games and you would like to contribute to a team and project where your drive and skills will be welcomed and encouraged, then we would love to hear from you.
GDPR COMPLIANCE – When applying for this job you’re authorising Flix Interactive to store your application information and distribute it to the appropriate email inboxes of senior team members in order to review your role eligibility.
Your application will be stored on a private cloud based online system for processing. If you would like us to update, delete or refine your application please email info@flixinteractive.com. Your request will be appended within 30 days of receiving your email.
Please note – In compliance with GDPR law your data will be used for recruitment purposes only. We are unable to accept candidates requiring visa sponsorship for this opportunity at this time.
