Payload Studios on cord

Payload Studios

Senior Designer

External position
Remote in UK
Hiring internally for Payload Studios?
Gaming · Entertainment · Media and Streaming
Makers of TerraTech and founders of the Tentacle Zone Events & Workspace
Posted
a month ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
15 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Games Designer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Game Design, Building Teams, Product Design
Other skills considered: Product Strategy, User Research, User Testing

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Remote
Work from: Within United Kingdom
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

This role is first and foremost about owning the design vision of a game in service of the studio's creative and commercial goals.

You are accountable for the design vision of the game day-to-day. You own the design direction, lead the design team, and ensure quality through hands-on craft. You work closely with the Studio Head/Creative Director, who provides oversight and retains final sign-off, and with the Producer to keep creative ambition, scope and delivery in balance.

Your success is measured by the quality and coherence of the player experience, the clarity of your design communication, and the team's ability to build confidently against a shared understanding of the game.


Key Responsibilities

1 - Design Direction and Player Experience

You ensure every element of the game, from mechanics, systems, progression, feel, pacing, serves the core pillars and player fantasy. You translate the high-level vision into detailed, buildable design that the team can act on with confidence.

At the concept and prototype stage, you work closely with the Studio Head/Creative Director to shape the game's design foundations. As development progresses, you maintain design coherence as the game vision evolves, ensuring new work strengthens rather than fragments the original vision.

You represent the design vision in publisher conversations, keeping alignment on direction, scope and creative intent as the game evolves.

Success looks like:

  • Core pillars translated into detailed mechanics, systems, and player-facing design
  • Design coherence and scope maintained as the game evolves through development
  • Identification of design risks, gaps, or contradictions before they become problems
  • Design documentation that is current, accessible, and useful to the team
  • Player-facing quality that supports the studio's target of 85%+ on Steam

2 - Team Design Leadership and Collaboration

You are the design authority the team works with day-to-day. You provide clear direction, timely feedback, and consistent creative guidance across disciplines, ensuring art, tech, and production are aligned on design intent. You create the conditions for the team to do their best work by being available, clear, and decisive.

You champion the "why" behind design decisions, helping the team understand intent so they can make good judgements independently when needed. You work closely with the Producer to ensure design priorities are realistic and well-sequenced, and that creative ambition and delivery remain in balance.

You also contribute design input to the studio's other projects and welcome the same in return, so ideas and craft flow naturally amongst our design team.

Success looks like:

  • The team understands the game and can make good decisions independently
  • Art, tech, and production are aligned on design intent and priorities
  • Design feedback is timely, specific, and constructive for the team
  • Design leadership that earns trust through consistency, clarity, and craft
  • A collaborative culture where ideas are welcomed and measured against the vision

3 - Design Quality and Iteration

You are responsible for the design quality of the game through active hands-on involvement. You play the game regularly yourself and with the team, identify what's working and what isn't, and drive iteration to improve the player experience. You ensure the game is progressing toward builds that are playable, testable, and demonstrably fun at every stage.

You work with the Producer to prepare for and respond to playtesting, player feedback, and data, ensuring design evolves based on evidence as well as instinct.

Success looks like:

  • Regular hands-on evaluation of the game driving meaningful iteration
  • Design problems identified and addressed early through play and testing
  • Builds that are playable and demonstrating progress toward the core player fantasy
  • Iteration grounded in a combination of player feedback, data, and design judgement
  • Quality and feel that meet the standards set by the Studio Head/Creative Director
  • Post-launch design direction informed by player feedback and data

Requirements

  • Proven experience as a Senior Designer or equivalent on shipped games.
  • Strong, hands-on experience designing and owning gameplay systems, mechanics, and progression in Unreal Engine, from concept through implementation, with the ability to prototype, tune, and iterate quickly.
  • Direct systems design and balancing experience in genres that depend on it (deck builders, automation, survival craft, procedural), with the numerical ability to model systems in a spreadsheet as a live balancing tool.
  • Experience using playtesting, feedback, and data to refine features and improve outcomes.
  • Excellent collaboration and communication skills across design, art, engineering, and production.
  • A pragmatic approach, focused on what moves the game forward and creates the best player experience.
  • Passion for games and a drive to turn strong design into player delight.

Company Benefits

  • Holiday - a generous 35+ days off, comprising 25 days of leave, 8 UK bank holidays, a studio wide shutdown between Christmas and New Year, plus 2 Wellbeing days.
  • Hybrid working - Payloaders have the option of working some of their week remotely/from home.
  • Health and Wellbeing - we offer our team access to an Eyecare Scheme, Employee Assistance Programme (which includes mental health support), regular mental health themed chats/roundtables, 2 x wellbeing days and trained Mental Health First Aiders. We also offer a Cycle to Work scheme which allows Payloaders to save money when purchasing a new bike.
  • Generous Family policy - includes 8 weeks fully paid paternity leave and 24 weeks fully paid maternity leave.
  • Tentacle Zone - as a Payloader you’ll have access to our Tentacle Zone community which includes exclusive knowledge sharing talks and events.
  • Socials and clubs - to celebrate together and get to know each other we host regular socials and staff clubs for all Payloaders.
  • Studio location - we’re based in the vibrant Farringdon, central London. There is a host of excellent local food markets and eateries within a short walk from the office.
Senior Designer at Payload Studios
Position posted a month ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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