Evan Griffiths

Here are the highest-paying companies in the UK for Software Engineers! (based on 'all levels' from Levels.fyi): 🥇 Citadel – £274,692 🥈 Wintermute – £274,382 🥉 Meta – £242,189 I posted late last year about how US companies (especially HFT / quant firms) were dominating UK compensation. Back then, Wintermute (UK founded) weren’t even in the top 10. Now they’ve jumped to #2, ahead of HRT, Jane Street, Meta and other huge names. Every company in the top 10 is now averaging £200K+ total comp for engineering roles. That would have been unthinkable for London just a few years ago. For founders: if you want to attract top engineering talent, this is your benchmark. As an aside, if you compare the London top 10 with the San Francisco top 10 you see a completely different type of company. SF is tech dominated. UK is still very much finance dominated. I'd love to see more UK founded tech companies in this top list!

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Just back from Northumbria University (thanks Dan Hodgson!) talking to final year students about their #gamedev careers. I wanted to share this terrible project example that I often see in portfolios: BAD student projects. They get you nowhere - they drag you down! I see them all the time. Remember your audience. What is your portfolio for? What purpose does it serve? To help get a job? Then you're trying to convince the people who matter most: recruiters and your potential future team... The RECRUITER wants to see that you are a "safe hire." They are scanning for competency and professionalism. They need to know you can finish a project, follow a brief, work as part of an effective team, and organize your work. If they can't figure out what you actually did in the first 10 seconds because your description is vague, you go in the "No" pile. They want to see the result, the role you played, and the tools you used—immediately. It's about IMPACT. They're asking: "Will hiring this person elevate the product and solve our problems?" The TEAM want to see your process. They don't care that you can drag-and-drop assets in UE5 or write lines of code; they want to know why you did it. They are looking for flow, pacing, and user experience, or evidence of design patterns and memory management. They want to see documentation, greybox layouts, performance profiling, and iterative development. Can you justify your decisions? A pretty screenshot proves you have eyes and hands; a breakdown of your mechanics, metrics, and test results proves you have a brain. It's about CONTEXT. They need to see the "ugly" parts that got you to the pretty parts. They need evidence that you understand games as a product for users, not just how to make things look cool. Visuals might catch the eye, but understanding the craft gets you the gig. Don't be like me in this video. Make games that people actually want to play. Keep the scope small, the quality high, and the documentation deep. Want an opportunity to have INFINITY27 show you how? #FREE Unreal Engine Authorised Training our #UE5 #SkillsBootcamps: mentorship, practical hands-on experience and professional development support to get you more work, freelance, or set up a studio. 👉 https://lnkd.in/esNdKq6z

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Following up on my previous post about using Modular Rig for simple environment animation, but this time focusing on a mechanical prop. This prop uses slightly more complex module than the previous one, and the results were honestly a bit surprising (in a good way). ➤ What worked well ✅ Moving beyond single-joint motion is doable, as long as the prop parts are spitted with animation in mind. ✅ Building a skeleton and painting skin weights directly in Unreal works well for this prop, which has a moderate complexity. ✅ Mechanical modules like Hinge and Piston are already well supported out of the box and easy to reason about. ➤ Where friction shows up ⚠️ This still isn’t a full DCC replacement. The quality of the result depends heavily on how well the asset is designed and segmented upfront. ➤ Bigger takeaway For me, this reinforced that Modular Rig lowers the barrier to keeping work entirely in-engine and expands what environment art and level design can include, especially for smaller projects where DCC round-trips aren’t available or are too costly. On top of that, it could potentially enable iteration to happen directly in the level. Still exploring, but I’m curious how others are thinking about where this kind of workflow fits into their pipelines. 🤔 #UnrealEngine #UE5 #TechnicalAnimation #GameDev #TechnicalArt #LevelDesign #ControlRig #AnimationPipeline

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As a freelance rigger, I need to make sure my builds have a lot of flexibility. So I've recently reworked my lid modules to add variable joint counts. By utilizing a curve-based output I can changed the amount of joints used based on the needs of the project. Higher joint counts for fidelity and control, lower counts for simplicity and optimization. Or I can test and iterate to find a happy middle ground. So animators using my rigs on film or game projects can enjoy the same features, such as: - Automated lid follow with eye movement - Main controls to position the lids through translation and sculpt the curvature with rotation/scale  - Secondary controls for finer detail (If there are enough joints to support it) - Manual or automated blinking. Animate controls, or activate the automated meet point between your posed lids for a perfect seal I've been using iterations of this system over my last few projects, both commercials and games. The core elements of this system have been floating around in my head since 2018, so it's been great to finally put it to the test. 

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The final jobs report for 2025 has been published, revealing that the UK games industry job market has reached a 5-year low this month, with 590 open roles across 107 companies. This is down from 756 jobs across 135 companies at the same time last year, and significantly lower than the peak of 2,821 open roles across 175 companies in June 2022. Here's hoping for a (sustainable) recovery in 2026 for all involved. #gamesjobs

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I gave a talk yesterday at Rust Manchester about lessons learned from porting Rig to JS through WASM (WebAssembly), as well as maintaining more general WASM compatibility within the core library. We dove into what WASM is and the direct benefits/relevance for Rig (as well as the AI agent ecosystem in general), how Rig currently uses WASM and what we're currently doing to maintain compatibility as well as talking about `rig-wasm` - our experimental library that we made to showcase full compatibility from Rust to JS. Many great conversations were had - looking forward to hopefully return in 2026! Slides can be found in replies.

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Games Industry Predictions for 2026 I want to share a set of personal predictions that reflect only my views and do not represent my employer, our community, or anyone else. These come from three years of our community’s data, insight from the 5,000 plus studios and partners connected to our network, and many polls and conversations with you. I am not putting hard numbers on most of these yet, but I am confident enough in the direction of these trends to offer these conclusions. In 2026 1. The velocity and magnitude of games hiring will continue to increase The recovery trend is real and accelerating. 2. Layoffs will remain in a similar magnitude ballpark to 2025 Stability will improve but not dramatically. 3. New entrants and attempted entrants will continue to accelerate Including graduates, lateral movers, and those laid off. 4. Early career pressure will remain extremely high I do not see entry challenges easing yet. 5. A rising share of laid off games professionals will find work outside games Despite point 1, the pressure of point 3 will still challenge point 1. 6. The share of open roles in North America and Western Europe will continue to decrease Opportunities will grow in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia. 7. A greater share of total production load will continue shifting to external development and contractors Studios will rely on distributed talent more than ever. 8. The average individual’s purchase of full price AAA games will remain flat or decline Prices are challenging in a tough macroeconomic environment, and, particularly, long running series compete with their own cheaper older entries. 9. Indie games will remain the majority of top critical titles Independent creators will continue to shape many celebrated releases. 10. The share of roles in North America will diversify slightly away from the top five states and regions Cost pressures will keep reshaping hiring footprints. 11. Gaps in supply and demand for the most competitive fields like game design, writing, and narrative will get worse Openings remain tight while demand rises. 12. Placement rates will, relatively, improve for mid career professionals with 5-15 years of experience A few fields will remain heavily oversubscribed. I know this reads as a tough picture. It is tough. But I do not believe in most apocalyptic scenarios. I believe it will keep becoming a more globally employed sector with downward pressure on compensation as similar quality talent emerges at lower cost locations. Discoverability will get harder and creators will need to adapt to new influencer driven and socially driven paths for players to find their work. Opportunity will still come from democratized access and the ability for anyone to create something great. The biggest challenges will be at the AAA level where costs remain high. Many teams risk staying locked in a hit or miss survival cycle. I hope more teams break out of that cycle and experiment with new approaches.

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Jane Street made $13.4bn last year and kept 48% of it as profit. Goldman? 26%. Barclays? 9%. That margin gap says everything. I’m speaking with loads of senior and VP-level devs in banks right now looking to move. Many junior devs still think a big bank title carries more weight than actually building real stuff at a prop shop. But when you look under the hood, the difference is night and day. At the prop firms: • Smaller teams, tighter feedback loops. • No fluff, you’re building things that directly drive PnL. • Better tech, better comp, more ownership. • Everyone’s sharp - no passengers. Even on my side as a recruiter, the difference is obvious. With prop shops, I’ve got a direct line to the hiring manager or internal talent lead. It’s fast, clear, and collaborative. Banks? It’s a maze - long cycles, no single point of contact, zero visibility, not much personality, and rarely any excitment or passion around the roles or what they are building. If you're a strong dev or quant still in banking and wondering why things feel slow or stale, this might be why. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss the move. #PropTrading #QuantFinance #HFT #BanksVsProp #RecruitmentInsights #TradingTech

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56% of my network think Blender is the new go-to modelling software for games - but I noticed something else... 🕵 This poll was more or less split right down the middle This 56% was made up from: - 3D artists from studios of all shapes and sizes (indie, AAA, stylised, realistic) - a strong amount of technical artists - a number of leaders (CEO, Co-Founder, Directors) - often from studios established in the past 5 years The 44% in the Max/Maya camp: - predominantly experienced 3D Artists from (or who have previously worked at) long-established studios (Ubisoft, PCF, EA etc) - very few tech artists or leaders on this side of it Which raised a few questions: 🤔 - is Blender more tech artist friendly? - are legacy pipelines blocking experienced artists from experimenting with Blender? Or does it just straight up not deliver the quality an experienced artist needs? I'll be interested to run this poll again in a couple of years to see it things have shifted at all My piece of advice: take a look at Blender! Dont be surprised to see it appearing on more and more specs, particularly from newer game studios It might just land you your dream job over the next few years #blender #gaming #gamingart #3DSmax #Maya

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I wanted to write some more thoughts after last week's post (that unexpectately went quite viral!) on the topic of devs not updating their JIRAs regularly. This seems like it's quite a universal experience no matter where you look. When there's so much friction against something so simple, one has to ask themselves, what are doing it for? My personal opinion on the topic is this: JIRA tasks (and other issues types) are intended to replace physical cards and post-its that live on a physical board. At certain scales you simply cannot have everything run on a board, hence the digitalization of our tools. A card (task, user story, epic whatever you want to name it) is supposed to be a conversation starter. Not all requirements need to be on the card. That's the whole point of using small cards, so you cannot write down all the specific requirements. I have a feeling that JIRA and its tasks, in a lot of places, only serve to provide PMs with data to see where there project is headed. (and devs understand this. The tool doesn't serve them so they don't interact with it). This is also quite natural I think. Projects are often complex and getting accurate progress information is hard to get by. You would need to rely on a very solid communication structure to surface that information. And that's incredibly tricky to set up and maintain. So JIRA often ends up trying to replicate this communicating structure. And that's where things go downhill in my opinion. Once your JIRA database becomes your main tool for work communication it stops being a work tracking tool. I believe that we can do better by utilizing JIRA in the same way that we would use a physical board. And our issues in JIRA the same way as we would use cards and post-its on this board. Keep things short, see each issue as the start of a potential conversation, make sure your teams keep talking, track the data and stay realistic about what JIRA is. It's supposed to be a representation of the work, not the work itself. And because the work is so complex, the tool has to be a simplified version. The map is not the terrain. Happy to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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This feature, part of Tomorrow’s Quants project, explores the technical skills junior quants are required to have to start their careers. Drawing on the opinions on 39 senior industry quants, we found that, perhaps surprisingly, advanced knowledge of AI tools isn’t near the top of the list. Coding in Python is, and so are solid finance and maths knowledge. https://lnkd.in/duDxfJeH

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