Tech Lead - XR Rapid Prototyping

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Job Type: Contract
• Salary: Not Specified
• Duration: 5-6 months initial contract
• Start Date: July 2025
• Working Hours: 10am – 7pm UK time

Nexus Studios is a global creative studio specializing in animation, artful live-action, and immersive experiences. We collaborate with award-winning directors and leading cultural brands, pushing the boundaries of entertainment with a focus on innovation, XR, and crafted storytelling.

This role is part of a nimble, highly creative prototyping team focused on developing short-cycle immersive demos. These demos aim to inspire and impress prospective partners by showcasing visually rich, experience-driven, and technically feasible concepts that represent the potential of the final product.

As the Tech Lead, you will be in a client-facing position, responsible for shaping and guiding the technical direction of the prototype team. Your focus will be on delivering fast, beautiful, and inventive results while remaining pragmatic and adhering to tight iteration loops. You will work closely with the Technology Director and Creative teams, contributing hands-on as well as providing technical leadership. This is an excellent opportunity for a creative technologist or engineering lead passionate about real-time visuals, rapid prototyping, and cutting-edge immersive platforms.

Requirements

What You'll Do:

• Lead the technical vision and architecture for immersive prototypes and interactive demos.
• Attend client meetings with the Technology Director, Product Tech Lead, and team to present technical aspects of the work.
• Collaborate with creative stakeholders to translate concept goals into feasible, visually compelling technical builds.
• Rapidly explore new frameworks, APIs, and SDKs for spatial interaction, real-time rendering, and UI/UX within XR, natively with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose.
• Manage and mentor the senior developer and technical artist on best practices, system coherence, and build pipeline consistency.
• Own and guide code standards, build system setup, and versioning for the demo team.
• Partner with the Technology Director and Product Tech Lead to align with the long-term product roadmap while maintaining creative freedom.
• Ensure demos are performant, stable, and visually impressive, even when built on temporary or experimental systems.
• Identify and de-risk technical unknowns early through previsualization, mockups, and hands-on prototyping.

What You Will Bring:

• 10+ years of professional software development experience.
• 4+ years in senior/lead roles within XR, games, real-time visualization, or creative technology environments.
• Proven ability to manage small teams while also contributing hands-on to technical delivery.
• Strong experience in real-time graphics programming, including GLSL or equivalent shader languages.
• Deep familiarity with Kotlin or similar languages for spatial computing and immersive interaction.
• A creative and experimental mindset, comfortable pushing visual boundaries while maintaining technical realism.
• Experience with rapid iteration and shipping prototypes or MVPs under tight timelines.
• Strong communication skills, particularly across cross-functional creative and technical teams.
• Comfort with evaluating and integrating new SDKs and platform features quickly.

Preferred Experience:

• Prior work on experience-based XR/AR/VR demos or interactive installations.
• Familiarity with spatial computing SDKs and device-native capabilities.
• Collaborative experience in mixed teams of designers, artists, and developers.
• Strong grasp of real-time rendering constraints, mobile GPU performance, and optimizing for immersive displays.
• Comfort with Unity.

Company Information

Nexus Studios is a Nexus-led role, embedded within a forward-thinking, creatively ambitious studio.