Senior Engine Developer

What we’re looking for

At Grendel, we create serious games that drive real change in healthcare, education, and sustainability. Our award-winning titles don’t just entertain—they make an impact.

We are looking for a highly motivated and skilled Senior to join our serious game development team. In this role, you will contribute to the development of realistic training simulations, including laparoscopic surgery training tools used by surgeons, with a focus on making interactions feel accurate, responsive, and believable by simulating the physical properties of organs and tissue with the fidelity and performance required for professional surgical training.

You’ll work on the low-level systems that sit at the heart of our games, including our proprietary physics engine. The game runs in Unity, but the physics layer is ours, built to model organ and tissue behaviour with a level of accuracy that goes beyond what off-the-shelf solutions provide. You’ll be a core contributor to that engine, as well as to the broader runtime systems that keep everything fast and stable.

Requirements

• Strong programming fundamentals in C# and/or C++ with a low-level mindset; you understand memory layout and allocation, cache optimization, and the underlying logic of language features
• Real-time programming experience: you think in frame budgets, CPU cycles, and have shipped or maintained systems under hard performance constraints
• Demonstrated experience profiling and optimising performance. You can diagnose why something is slow, and fix the root cause.
• Professional experience working on physics systems, simulation engines or other real-time technical systems.
• Experience with Unity as a development platform.
• Comfortable working with linear algebra and realtime physics logic
• Able to read and reason about technical documentation: research papers, API references and engine internals.
• Experience debugging complex systems: crashes, memory corruption, threading issues.
• Able to ensure deterministic behaviour in real-time systems; understanding of why this is hard and how to approach it
• Strong documentation habits, capturing and sharing technical decisions and best practices
• Fluent in English

Nice to have

Familiarity with procedural animation, or soft-body simulation

• Experience with or interest in simulation or physics behaviour
• Awareness of shader and rendering pipeline considerations (draw calls, GPU sync, batching)

What We Offer

• Join us in creating games with a purpose where your work contributes to meaningful learning and training experiences.
• A salary package aligned with market standards.
• An annual personal development budget to support professional growth.
• Autonomy and responsibility in organizing and executing your work within a flat corporate hierarchy.
• Collaboration with a passionate and innovative team in a unique setting — our historic Dutch prison turned relaxed game studio.
• Flexible work arrangements, allowing remote work for part of the week.

Apply directly on our website :)