Senior App Developer

Salary: £65,000 - £75,000
Location: UK or Europe
Please note: We are unable to sponsor international visas at this time.

About Nexus Mods
Established in 2001, Nexus Mods is the largest video game modding platform on the internet - a household name in the PC gaming ecosystem.

• 71M+ registered members
• 800K+ mods for 4,000+ games
• 21B+ mod downloads

We're currently focused on product modernisation, driving growth and building infrastructure for the next 10 years of community-powered modding.

Our Role:
We're looking for experienced Senior App Engineers to join our App Engineering team, working on Vortex, Nexus Mods' flagship desktop mod manager. In this role, you will design, build, and scale the application and systems that power the Vortex experience for millions of PC gamers. This is a chance to work on problems most companies never see: massive scale, complex compatibility, deep operating system integration, and passionate user communities.

From discovery and experimentation, to delivery and scale, you'll be hands-on in shaping features that directly impact the modding ecosystem:

• Helping millions of gamers install, sort, and manage mods effortlessly across hundreds of games.
• Empowering extension authors and community developers to add new game support and features with confidence.
• Powering complex, long running client side workflows - downloads, deployments, profile switching, and conflict resolution.
• Building across the Electron main process, renderer, and extension surfaces of a desktop app run on widely varying hardware and OS configurations.
• Improving performance, scalability, and reliability of critical client side systems.
• Creating tools that make modding safer, more accessible, easier and more fun.
• Experimenting with new features and quickly validating ideas with real users.
• Tackling complex challenges around dependencies, versioning, load orders, and compatibility across 500+ supported games.
• Identifying and tackling technical debt, ensuring our application evolves to handle the next decade of growth in gaming.

Vortex's user base today is overwhelmingly on Windows, but Linux support is on the long-term roadmap. The engineering team already works across operating systems, so the codebase and tooling need to be portable from the start. We need people to help move Vortex from Windows-first to properly cross-platform.

• Own significant areas of the application - designing, building, and maintaining robust, secure, scalable features across the Electron main process, renderer, and extension surfaces, for tens of millions of users on widely varying hardware and OS configurations.
• Contribute across the delivery lifecycle - from discovery and prototyping through breaking down complex requirements into technical plans and leading multi-sprint delivery, including new game support and major workflow changes.
• Tackle hard technical problems in the codebase - performance regressions, race conditions, and complex state bugs.
• Evolve local data, configuration, and user profiles safely across releases - migrating existing setups without data loss or corruption.
• Collaborate closely with other engineering teams to deliver end to end features, and review and support contributions from community developers as well as internal engineers.
• Help steward the public extension API so third party authors can keep building against Vortex with minimal friction, while keeping the trust and permission model around third party code sound.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and operational standards, and diagnose and resolve field issues using crash reports, error telemetry, and logs to reproduce problems on configurations you can't directly observe.
• Drive best practices in performance optimisation, state management, security, data protection, accessibility, and internationalisation on the client side.
• Write clean, maintainable code with meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end test coverage, and uphold high standards across CI/CD, packaging, and documentation.
• Help mentor other engineers and continue to share engineering standards across pods.

Requirements

• Strong application engineering experience, ideally with desktop, gaming, or creator tooling, at a level where you've consistently operated as a senior engineer on substantial systems.
• Deep experience with TypeScript and modern JavaScript in production.
• Experience with Electron, including main vs renderer separation, and a willingness to reason about platform-specific behaviour in file systems, paths, permissions, and OS integration across Windows and Linux.
• Strong React experience, including state management.
• Solid understanding of Node.js, async patterns, streaming I/O, and child processes.
• Experience designing and building APIs consumed by other developers, with an eye for backwards compatibility and versioning.
• Strong system design skills applied to client side systems - module boundaries, plugin/extension models, data flow, and persistence.
• Experience debugging and supporting production software running on end-user machines you don't control - crash and error reporting, log analysis, and reproducing environment-specific issues.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, and an awareness of how desktop apps are packaged, signed, and shipped.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work in a cross-functional team.
• Ability to balance speed, quality and pragmatism in a long lived codebase with active community contributors.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with packaging, code signing, and auto-update for production desktop apps (electron-builder, NSIS, Flatpak, or equivalent).
• Experience with authentication and download/distribution systems on the client side.
• Background in high scale desktop platforms, launchers, or content distribution clients (Steam, Epic, GOG Galaxy, Battle.net, modding tools, etc).
• Experience taking a Windows-first desktop app to Linux, or maintaining Windows/Linux parity in production.
• Experience working on open source projects or collaborating with external community contributors.
• Understanding of gaming ecosystems: game file formats, save management, load orders, plugin systems.
• Experience building tools for creators, modding communities, or user-generated content platforms.
• Familiarity with Bethesda Creation Engine, FOMOD, Wabbajack or other established modding standards.
• Passion for games and mods. Whether that's tweaking Skyrim load orders, building Minecraft servers, or diving into Baldur's Gate 3 mods.

Benefits

• We work a 4-day week of 32 hours, with no reduction in pay.
• An allowance of £25 each month to spend on video games.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Private BUPA healthcare for you and your family.
• A very flexible training budget.
• Regular social events throughout the year. Participation is optional!

Diversity and Inclusion
We celebrate diversity and want you to bring your whole self to work.
Supporting an incredible community of tens of millions of users, we thrive on engaging as many views as possible to improve our platform. We see no reason why our culture should be any different.