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Unity Developer | Contract | £300 pd

Overview

  • £200-£300 pd DOE
  • 3 month contract
  • Hybrid working

Benefits

  • Opportunity to progress to a full time role
 

Who We Are & What We Do

Karno is an immersive gaming company with a rich heritage of incredible games experienced in the real world. In 2.8 Hours Later, zombies chased players across their city and in Wolves we had a real wolf pack eluding players in the Lakeland Hills. Our games are deeply engaging, sometimes challenging, but they always ask searching questions about how humans live together, and within the natural world.

Now, we are embarking on a hugely ambitious and very exciting project: a new game that takes place entirely within players’ mobile devices, but requires players to move about the world to move through the game. It’s a kind of nature treasure hunt that aims to educate young people about ecology through play and exercise. We’re calling it Loupe  and we’re putting together a team to build it.

Core to the game is an innovative bit of technology, an AI component that predicts the presence of species at any point on the earth’s surface. The game uses this to determine what lives at the player’s location and to set challenges. To build this, we are working with leading academics from Bristol and Birmingham Universities, including a professor of biodiversity modelling. 

We are a purpose driven company with a culture that promotes employee wellbeing, and a healthy work life balance. We operate an open and flat company structure, valuing the creativity and contribution of all members of the team. Bristol based, we are a remote first company but expect attendance in our workspace at least once a week.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Unity developer to join us building a proof of concept prototype. This is initially for a 12 week engagement, but we aim to extend this as we secure further funding – ideally this will become a full time PAYE role.

We’re a startup planning on scaling quickly, but sustainably. The opportunity will suit someone who relishes challenges, is highly flexible (startup life is never predictable) and wants to work on products that have impact on the serious environmental challenges humanity is facing.

What You Will Be Doing

You will be working closely with Karno founder and game designer Simon Evans, ex-Niantic game development consultant V Buckenham and game artist Sarah Ford (Pacific Drive) on building the game. 

The AI team will be building the species prediction model alongside your game development work. You’ll be liaising with them regularly, sharing our ideas about gaming species prevalence and co-existence, and feeding back on the data the AI model produces.

We have prepared a game design document, logic flow diagrams and wireframes. We have also created a draft backlog and you will collaborate with the team in planning out a series of sprints, within which you will undertake the work over 12 weeks of the contract.

You will be responsible for undertaking the development of the game, this will include:

  • Implementing logic flows and game loops
  • Implementing the game UI designs
  • liaising with our developer who is working on the AI component, to share game data requirements and feedback on the model output
  • Facilitating testing at key points of the development cycle
  • Publishing the game to the relevant app stores for testing
  • Implementing testing feedback

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for an experienced Unity developer who is a highly flexible, self-reliant team player. You should have a permanent right to work in the UK. We are looking for someone who is:

  • A developer experienced building UI-focused mobile games with Unity
  • Has good C# skills
  • Comfortable collaborating with artists & designers
  • Cares about making a quality game that players will enjoy
  • Who is also pragmatic and knows that done is often better than perfect

It’d be great if you also:

  • had an interest in the natural world, especially the flora and fauna of the UK
  • want to help address environmental collapse
  • had experience working with GIS data

What You get in Return

We’re offering £200 to £300 per day, for a three month contract. We are Bristol based, and whilst this is a remote role, we expect attendance in our Bristol office at least once a week.

Apply Now

Send your CV to jobs@karno.is along with a short note on why you are interested in this opportunity. Also, if you have a portfolio, Github, or website to show us that would be great.

No agencies

 

Jobs

We are not currently hiring

However, if you have skills and experience in animation for games, AR or game artwork and you are interested in our mission to transform people’s relationship with the natural world, drop us a line, along with your CV: jobs@karno.is

Software Developer | Full time | £55K

Overview

  • £35K-£55K DOE
  • Full time
  • Hybrid working
  • Laptop provided

Benefits

  • Additional Christmas Paid Holiday
  • Stock options
 

Who We Are & What We Do

Karno is an immersive gaming company with a rich heritage of incredible games experienced in the real world. In 2.8 Hours Later, zombies chased players across their city and in Wolves we had a real wolf pack eluding players in the Lakeland Hills. Our games are deeply engaging, sometimes challenging, but they always ask searching questions about how humans live together, and within the natural world.

Now, we are embarking on a hugely ambitious and very exciting project: a new game that takes place entirely within players’ mobile devices, but requires players to move about the world to move through the game. It’s a kind of nature treasure hunt that aims to educate young people about ecology through play and exercise. We’re calling it Loupe and we’re putting together a team to build it.

Core to the game is an innovative bit of technology, an AI component that predicts the presence of species at any point on the earth’s surface. The game uses this to determine what lives at the player’s location and to set challenges. To build this, we are working with leading academics from Bristol and Birmingham Universities, including a professor of biodiversity modelling. 

We are a purpose driven company with a culture that promotes employee wellbeing, and a healthy work life balance. We operate an open and flat company structure, valuing the creativity and contribution of all members of the team. Bristol based, we are a remote first company but expect attendance in our workspace at least once a week.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a back end developer, our first tech hire to work with our academic partners in developing our artificial intelligence technology. We will be growing quickly over the next four years and you will form the core of our development team, along with the game developer hire, developing new products but also establishing workflows, incorporating best practice and building deployment pipelines.

We’re a startup planning on scaling quickly, but sustainably. The opportunity will suit someone who relishes challenges, is highly flexible (startup life is never predictable) and wants to work on products that have impact on the serious environmental challenges humanity is facing.

What You Will Be Doing

You will be working closely with the academics in building the technology, based on a new foundation model that uses graph neural networks. This will involve:

  • Identifying appropriate data sources with which to train the model
  • Processing the data to prepare it for training
  • Building a pipeline that supports model training but also various testing approaches such as A/B
  • Work with our biodiversity modelling expert and benchmark data to evaluate the model output
  • Deploy the AI component and work with the game developer to enable the game to utilise the AI output
  • Continue to develop and refine the AI technology as learning emerges through evaluation and game testing
  • Support game operations with contributions such as player account management
  • Work with the game developer and consultant analyst to implement the game measurement plan
  • Support general company operations such as company and game website back-end development

Who We Are Looking For

We are looking for a U.K. based developer with 2-4 years professional experience who shares our determination to help address environmental breakdown. You will relish the ups and downs of startup life, and the rewards in which you will share. We are looking for a highly flexible, self-reliant team player who will contribute ideas and solutions to all aspects of the game development, and company operations.

As a talented developer, we assume that specific programming languages are not an issue, you can learn them. Obviously Python would be advantageous, but not essential. Other than that, here are a few things that we’d expect to see competence in:

  • Designing, developing & deploying scalable backend systems.
  • All aspects of CICD such as containerisation, deployment technologies & cloud platforms using tools and services such as Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker or AWS
  • Data processing using tools such as NumPy
  • Measurement platforms such Amplitude or Mixpanel
  • Agile development approaches



Some things that we’d be pleased to see:

  • Experience with machine learning technologies like PyTorch, TensorFlow or Spark
  • Exposure to backend app services such as Firebase

What You get in Return

We’re offering £35k to £50k annual full time salary, 30 days annual leave, including public holidays, and pension. A laptop is supplied. We will consider proposals for undertaking this role part time.

Apply Now

Send your CV to jobs@karno.is along with a short note on why you are interested in this opportunity. Also, if you have a portfolio, Github, or website to show us that would be great.

No agencies