Principal Programmer

As a Principal Programmer you will have a desire to focus and specialise your technical skills further, working with our teams to innovate and drive programming expertise.

Third Kind Games - a Virtuos Studio, is a world-class co-development games studio. Third Kind Games was founded in 2016 by a team of nine former Activision veterans and became a Virtuos Studio in 2024.

Our studio is based in Royal Leamington Spa and we also have remote studios in Poland and Spain. Our three studios have been built on the same original spirit and values since our beginning.

We work with some of the biggest names in the games industry such as Blizzard, Amazon, Microsoft and Mythical Games. We’re proud of our track record working on critically acclaimed games and franchises. We are also setting new benchmarks for creativity in the games industry, driving technical expertise in programming alongside creative innovation.

What is it like to be a Third Kinder?

We are a diverse team of people. We are collaborative, open-minded creatives who embrace ideas and knowledge from everyone in our team, with the aim of developing and inspiring ourselves, our projects and our games.

Work life balance and flexibility are very important to us and our team. At TKG we offer a place where our team can be their most creative, imaginative and confident selves. We want all of our team to feel valued, appreciated, and free to be who they are at work. TKG recently received a GOLD Award in Mind Charity’s Workplace Wellbeing Index, recognising our dedication to our team’s mental health and wellbeing.

Role Overview

You enjoy:

• Understanding our customer needs and ensuring the programming team contributes to player satisfaction and enjoyment, making our games more fun to play.
• Advising and supporting the Lead Programmers by prioritising the daily workflows to ensure a balanced approach to workload and production management.
• Leading by example and using your knowledge to support the development, mentoring and performance of fellow programmers.
• Working with a highly experienced team on all areas of the game, both client and server.
• Fully owning complex systems through design and development, working closely with the Programmers and other disciplines to realise their visions.
• Helping to drive our creative planning sessions, scrums, and retrospectives and other engineering processes around programming.
• Proactively contributes improvements and rolls them out to the wider org.

What we are looking for from a Third Kinder

You would:

• Be capable of working autonomously, gathering your own requirements and creating your own solutions.
• Be capable of learning a new language or technology without guidance.
• Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry movements.
• Enjoy working with a lot of different technologies, and have a keen desire to learn new ones.
• Will prefer a creative, open-thinking environment over one driven by specs and detailed requirements.
• Be adept at communicating with colleagues and customers to work well as a team.
• Enjoy working with a lot of different technologies and have a keen desire to learn new ones.
• Be motivated by creative freedom, ground-breaking initiatives and unknown territory.
• Prefer a creative, open-thinking environment, over one managed through specs and have a passion for working on a wide variety of tasks.
• Be able to work alone and also as part of a team, whilst knowing when to ask for advice from your colleagues.

Skills you need

• 10+ years' industry experience.
• 5+ years' C++ or C# experience.
• Experience with engines such as Unity, Lumberyard and Unreal.

Skills it would be great to have

Experience with:

• Cloud services such as PlayFab and GameSparks.