Unreal Engine Developer - Simulation & Graphics

Emirates Team New Zealand builds the technology that wins the America's Cup. Our simulation tools are central to how we design, test, and race our yachts — and we're looking for an Unreal Engine developer to help take them to the next level.

This role sits at the intersection of real-time graphics and high-performance simulation. You'll be building and maintaining the visual front ends for our internal racing simulation tools, as well as contributing to external commercial projects. The physics happen in our own software — your job is to make the environment look and behave convincingly, perform well, and give our sailors and engineers a genuinely useful tool.

What You'll Be Working On

• Developing and maintaining Unreal Engine applications used for yacht racing simulation
• Creating realistic marine environments — water surfaces, waves, spray, weather, and lighting
• Building landscapes and environmental assets that support both simulation fidelity and visual clarity
• Animating objects and crew figures to support scenario visualisation
• Working with textures, materials, and lighting to achieve high-quality real-time results
• Collaborating with our simulation engineers and naval architects to understand requirements and translate them into effective visual tools
• Contributing to external commercial simulation projects alongside internal work

Requirements

What we're looking for

• Strong hands-on experience with Unreal Engine, including both Blueprint and C++
• Solid graphics skills — materials, lighting, textures, post-processing — you understand why things look the way they do
• Ability to create and iterate on animations of objects and characters; you don't need to be an artist, but you can get things moving convincingly
• Experience with, or genuine interest in, marine environments — water shaders, ocean systems, spray and wake effects are a real advantage
• Landscape and terrain work in Unreal
• Knowledge on the C++ side, where you'll work in communication and networking between the physics and the graphics
• Ability to collaborate closely with engineers

What We're Not Looking For

You don't need a background in physics simulation or hydrodynamics — that's handled by other members of the team. And while aesthetic sensibility matters, this isn't an art role. We need someone who codes well and understands graphics deeply.

Benefits

Full-time, on-site in Auckland. You'll be embedded in a small, technically excellent team working on problems that genuinely matter to our campaign. The work ranges from internal tooling used daily by our design team to commercial projects that take the same technology into new industries.

If you've built real-time environments in Unreal and want to apply that to one of the most technically demanding sports programmes in the world, we'd like to hear from you.