Technical Director

About Kinetic Games

We’re an independent games studio best known for creating Phasmophobia, enjoyed by millions of players worldwide. Our team is passionate, creative, and collaborative and we’re looking for someone equally enthusiastic about games to join our growing team.

We’re a small but fast growing, friendly team that values creativity, openness, and personal growth. Whether you’re helping various departments or talking about your favourite horror game, you’ll be part of a supportive environment where passion and curiosity are celebrated. You’ll be joining a small but ambitious team where your ideas are valued, your growth is supported, and your development truly matters.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important to how we work together every day. We aim to build a team with diverse experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. We believe great games start with an inclusive environment where everyone can contribute, grow, and succeed. Applications from all qualified candidates are encouraged. Equal opportunities are provided throughout our recruitment and employment practices.

If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know. We'll work with you to understand your needs and provide appropriate support wherever reasonably practicable.

About the role:

As Technical Director, you will own the studio-wide technical direction at Kinetic Games, working closely with the Game Director, Development Director, Programming Leads and other discipline leadership.

You will provide technical oversight across projects, ensure engineering teams are set up to succeed, identify and manage technical risks, and help establish the standards and practices required as the studio continues to scale.

This is not purely an architectural or advisory position. We are looking for someone who remains technically credible and actively engaged with development, able to investigate difficult problems, review technical solutions and provide practical guidance when teams need support.

You will also play an important role in shaping our longer-term technology strategy, including evaluating engines, platforms, tools and development practices for Phasmophobia.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Define and maintain the studio's overall technical vision and strategy.
• Provide technical leadership to ensure projects have appropriate architecture, engineering standards and technical plans.
• Provide oversight of major technical decisions and ensure solutions support long-term maintainability and scalability.
• Identify technical risks early and work with teams to resolve them before they impact development.
• Maintain a strong understanding of the technical health of Phasmophobia.
• Establish engineering standards, development practices and technical review processes.
• Review and challenge major architectural decisions where appropriate.
• Support Programming Leads and senior engineers with complex technical problems.
• Ensure performance, stability, networking, platform requirements and scalability are considered throughout development.
• Work across disciplines to resolve technical dependencies and ensure technology supports design, art, audio, QA and production requirements.
• Partner with Production and Development leadership when making decisions around scope, technical investment and delivery.
• Help determine when technical debt should be addressed and ensure it does not create unacceptable long-term risk.
• Evaluate new technologies, engines, middleware, tools and workflows where they could improve development.
• Help define the technical direction of future Kinetic Games projects.
• Contribute to engineering recruitment, team structure and workforce planning.
• Help develop Programming Leads while building a strong engineering culture across the studio.
• Ensure strong security and best practices are used for back-end multiplayer services.

Requirements:

• Significant professional game development experience, including experience in a senior technical leadership role.
• Experience shipping commercially released games on PC and console.
• Strong hands-on programming and software engineering knowledge.
• Strong understanding of modern game architecture and development pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of areas such as performance, memory, rendering, networking, build systems, tools and platform development.
• Ability to understand unfamiliar technical systems quickly and challenge technical decisions constructively.
• Experience providing technical direction across multiple teams or large multidisciplinary projects.
• Experience working effectively with Programming Leads, Principal Engineers and other senior technical staff.
• Strong understanding of the relationship between engineering decisions, production constraints and game quality.
• Ability to communicate complex technical issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable making difficult technical decisions and taking accountability for their outcomes.

Desirable Experience

• Experience working on multiplayer and live service games.
• Experience supporting a successful live game.
• Experience developing games across PC and current generation consoles (PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo platforms).
• Experience with Unity and/or Unreal Engine.

Benefits & Perks

💰 Comprehensive Reward Package

💼  Enhanced Employer Match Pension Scheme

💸  Annual Bonus

🍽️  Weekly Free Team Lunches  

🎉  Regular Social Events  

🏠  Hybrid & Flextime Working  

⚽  Access to Southampton Football Club Tickets - subject to availability and sponsor allocation

📦  Relocation Package (within the UK only)

🚗 Electric Vehicle Car Scheme

🏅  Employee of the Month Vouchers

🧘 ♀️  Personal Wellbeing Allowance

🤝  Recruitment Referral Scheme

🎓  Training & Development Budget

🚀  Training & Career Development  

💚  Vitality Health Insurance  

🛡️  Aviva Life Insurance

🎂  30 days Holiday in Total

🎄  Christmas Studio Shutdown