Technical Director

UK or West Midlands-based / Full-Time Permanent Please note: We welcome applicants who prefer to work from home. However, occasional travel across the UK and to our office in Bromsgrove will be expected. We cannot offer visa sponsorship for this opportunity at this time.

Role Overview: As Technical Director, you will define and lead the technical strategy, architecture and capability of the studio's development work. You will combine strategic leadership with hands on technical involvement, guiding complex technical decisions, supporting high-quality delivery, and ensuring teams have the tools, systems and technical foundations needed to build scalable, performant and innovative games.

A central part of your role will be to embed effective AI use, automation and commercially valuable tooling within the studio's development pipelines alongside the commercial benefits/pitfalls and legal requirement/impact. For each project, you will be responsible for determining what is technically feasible, commercially viable, and legally and contractually permissible (alongside our legal team and CEO), then translating those decisions into practical, approved workflows. This includes coordinating the specialist advice and client approvals required to support their use.

You will drive technical proficiency and operational efficiency across the studio, ensuring that investment in technology, tools and people produces measurable improvements in project delivery, product quality and commercial performance.

Key Responsibilities: Technical Strategy and Direction

• Define and evolve the technical vision, strategy, standards and long term capability required to support current and future projects.
• Translate business, client, stakeholder and product needs into clear technical approaches, balancing ambition with budgets, timescales, delivery risks and ongoing support requirements.
• Maintain a prioritised technical roadmap covering core technology, AI adoption, tooling, automation and research and development, with clear investment priorities and expected outcomes.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen the studio's technical capabilities and competitive position, ensuring that technical decisions support sustainable growth and reliable project delivery.

Architecture and Technical Excellence

• Guide the design of scalable technical architecture across tools, automation, rendering, audio, integrations, telemetry and core game systems.
• Lead critical technical reviews and complex problem solving, ensuring solutions are robust, maintainable, secure, performant and appropriate for each project's needs.
• Establish and promote consistent standards for engineering quality, testing, profiling, optimisation, documentation and technical review.
• Identify and manage technical debt, dependencies and architectural risks, making proportionate investment decisions that balance immediate delivery requirements with longer term efficiency.

AI Adoption and Project Pipeline Ownership

• Lead the practical adoption of AI across engineering, art, design, QA, production and supporting workflows. Ensure opportunities are actively assessed on every project and implemented where they meet the studio's technical, commercial and legal requirements.
• Determine what is technically feasible: Evaluate whether proposed AI tools and workflows can reliably meet production requirements, including output quality, accuracy, integration, performance, security and maintainability. Validate promising approaches through proportionate trials before wider adoption.
• Determine what is commercially viable: Assess the full cost and expected benefit of each proposed workflow, including implementation, licences, computing resources, training, human review, rework and ongoing support. Establish whether it improves delivery capacity, project margins, quality or client value.
• Establish legal and contractual clearance: Own the process for confirming that proposed pipelines are permitted under relevant licences, contracts and studio policies. Coordinate appropriate legal advice and any required client approvals, addressing intellectual property, confidentiality, data protection, and rights relating to AI inputs and outputs.
• Define and document the approved pipeline for each project, including permitted tools, use cases and data, required human oversight, quality checks and any restrictions. Ensure teams understand and follow these decisions, with suitable alternatives where particular AI uses are inappropriate or prohibited.
• Maintain oversight throughout delivery, reviewing pipeline decisions when tools, supplier terms, client requirements or project circumstances materially change.

Technology Tools and Commercial Innovation

• Drive the development and adoption of tools, technical workflows, automation and research initiatives that solve meaningful production problems and improve development efficiency and product quality.
• Approach tooling with a commercial mindset, prioritising investment according to expected return, frequency of use, potential reuse across projects, delivery impact and total cost of ownership.
• Make informed build-versus-buy decisions, evaluating internal development, existing technology and external integrations against cost, capability, reliability, integration effort and ongoing support needs.
• Ensure significant tooling initiatives have a clear purpose, an accountable owner, an adoption plan and measurable success criteria. Review their benefits after implementation and improve or retire solutions that no longer justify their cost.
• Identify opportunities to create reusable studio technology, proprietary intellectual property or commercially licensable tools where there is a credible business case and the studio holds the necessary rights.
• Ensure tools and systems remain accessible, documented and maintainable, so their value can be realised consistently across teams and projects.

Studio Proficiency Efficiency and Delivery

• Drive continuous improvement in how the studio delivers projects, working with production and discipline leads to identify bottlenecks, reduce repetitive work, shorten iteration cycles and prevent avoidable rework.
• Raise proficiency in approved technologies, AI tools and development workflows through practical training, mentoring, documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Establish consistent practices across projects where they improve quality and efficiency, while allowing appropriate flexibility for different clients, platforms and delivery requirements.
• Improve the reliability of development pipelines, including build systems, testing, asset integration and release processes, ensuring teams can work efficiently and resolve issues early.
• Work with production to strengthen technical estimation, planning and risk management, ensuring delivery commitments reflect the capability and capacity available.
• Use agreed measures, such as iteration time, build reliability, defect and rework levels, delivery predictability and total delivery cost, to demonstrate improvements and guide further investment.

Technical Leadership and Collaboration

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering teams, developing technical leaders and supporting sound decision-making, clear ownership and consistent engineering practices.
• Partner with production, creative leadership, business development and other stakeholders to support technical planning, proposals and successful project delivery.
• Contribute to project scoping and commercial discussions by clearly explaining technical options, assumptions, dependencies, costs and delivery trade-offs.
• Communicate technical strategy, progress and risks clearly to studio leadership, clients and project teams, making complex issues understandable and actionable.
• Coordinate the resolution of significant technical challenges across projects and ensure that lessons, improvements and reusable solutions are shared throughout the studio.

Quality and Design Benchmarking

• Define and uphold the studio's quality bar for technical delivery, with clear, measurable standards for performance, stability, security and player experience.
• Benchmark the studio's technology, tools, pipelines and delivery quality against proven industry standards and comparable AA and AAA titles, identifying gaps and prioritising improvements.
• Bring a proven understanding of design benchmarks, including established game systems, player experience standards and best in class approaches, to judge whether technical solutions support the quality players and partners expect.
• Work with design, art and production leads to turn benchmarking findings into practical technical targets, such as performance, responsiveness, load times and stability.
• Use benchmarking evidence alongside agreed measures to guide investment, demonstrate improvement and show quality to studio leadership and clients.
• Capture benchmarks, lessons learned and proven approaches in a shared reference so they can be reused across projects.

What we see in you

• Strong technical leadership experience across game development, architecture and studio level technical strategy.
• Deep understanding of software architecture, technical stacks, systems development and cross platform delivery.
• Practical experience evaluating and integrating AI tools into development workflows, with the ability to distinguish promising experiments from reliable production solutions.
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