Ninja Theory Resume Guide: Writing a CV for a Game That Won't Ship

On October 5, 2026, Ninja Theory staff started posting their redundancies publicly on LinkedIn: gameplay programmers, technical directors, performance capture techs, principal sound designers. Two Microsoft attempts to sell the Cambridge studio collapsed, UK consultation on closure began, and the third Hellblade entry, Senua, revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2026 with a 2027 window, is stranded with no confirmed future.

If you are one of the people whose last two to four years went into that project, your resume has a hole shaped for a game you cannot link, demo, or in some cases even name in detail. This piece is for you, and for the roughly 485 UK professionals in Refolk's index who hold the exact title stack the layoff hit: gameplay programmer, technical artist, sound designer, technical director, character artist. The standard AAA resume formula, "shipped title plus Metacritic plus units," is the wrong tool this cycle. Here is what works instead.

Why "shipped title" is a trap metric in 2026

Lead with process artifacts, not product names, because every hiring manager reviewing a Ninja Theory CV in late 2026 already knows "Senua" means "unshippable." The GDC State of the Game Industry 2026 report found 48% of laid-off devs had not yet found a new job, and TIGA recorded a 4.5% drop in UK games specialists between May 2024 and September 2025, the worst year on record. The reviewer stack is saturated with resumes whose top line is a cancelled project. Yours needs a different top line.

Process artifacts are the budgets you hit, the pipelines you chose, and the systems you shipped internally. They survive cancellation. Examples that work:

• "Cut Nanite memory footprint 38% on the hero character by rebuilding LOD authoring in Houdini." (if true)
• "Owned Metasounds graph standard across combat, cinematics, and locomotion for a 70-person team."
• "Shipped internal mocap-to-engine pipeline reducing per-shot cleanup from 6 hours to 90 minutes."

None of those require a store page. All of them are legible to a hiring director at Playground Games or Supermassive. The game's name becomes context, not the claim.

The 485-person UK shortlist you are actually competing in

Your realistic competitive set is a six-studio UK shortlist, not the whole global market. In Refolk's index, 485 UK games-industry pros currently hold the title stack affected at Ninja Theory. The top employers holding or hiring those titles are Playground Games, Build A Rocket Boy, Sports Interactive, Supermassive Games, Media Molecule, and Epic Games UK. That is where Cambridge staff land, not Naughty Dog.

The same five titles return 849 US pros, a 1.75x larger pool. That looks like opportunity until you note the US concentration is LA, visa sponsorship for 2026 has thinned, and the top US employers (Naughty Dog, Squanch Games, Zynga, Fortis Games, Supercell) are not aggressively hiring the mid-career ICs Microsoft just severed in Cambridge. The 1.75x ratio is a relocation signal, not a career signal.

Tune per studio. Playground Games cares about open-world streaming, so lead with your streaming budgets. Sports Interactive cares about data-driven simulation and long tenure, so lead with systems and retention. Build A Rocket Boy is hiring across disciplines, so lead with pipeline flexibility. Blasting one resume at all six wastes your best shot, which is the exact friction Refolk exists to remove: paste the Playground job and the Supermassive job, get two different resumes back, each written from your own history against that specific posting.

How to write bullets for a game you cannot link

Write bullets about the mechanism, the measurement, and the scope, in that order, so the reader does not need to have played the game. The game's name goes in the role line, not the bullet. If NDAs or Microsoft severance terms limit what you can say about Senua specifically, you still own your craft, your decisions, and your numbers.

A worked example for a gameplay programmer, anchored on Katrin Mair's four-year tenure as a public reference point for the role:

Weak version, cancellation-dependent:

• "Worked on combat systems for Hellblade III (Senua)."

Strong version, cancellation-proof:

• "Rebuilt melee hit-reaction system in Unreal 5, cutting per-attack animation authoring from 3 days to 4 hours across a 12-enemy roster."
• "Owned combat networking refactor for a single-player title with deterministic replay, keeping desync-free playback under 2 ms per frame on target hardware."
• "Mentored two junior gameplay programmers through a full combat vertical slice; both promoted inside 18 months."

Nobody needs to have shipped the game to evaluate those claims. A hiring lead at Supermassive reads them and knows exactly what you can do on day one.

The sound designer problem

Sound is over-indexed in this layoff (three of the nine named departures are audio roles: Alessio Mellina, Matteo Tummino, Daniele Galante) and over-indexed in the UK data at 25% vs the 22% baseline. The core issue is that audio reels usually require game footage, and your game footage is on a Microsoft server you can no longer access.

Three fixes that work:

1. Build a Metasounds-first reel. Record the graph, the parameterization, and the real-time response to synthetic input. No game footage needed, and it demonstrates authoring skill a wav file cannot.
2. Ship a Wwise or FMOD project with a public downloadable session. A hiring audio director can open it and audit your bus structure in 90 seconds.
3. Narrate a three-minute walkthrough over new work built in Unreal's Lyra sample, if severance terms block the use of pre-cancellation internal footage.

The 12-year tenure problem

Long tenures (Alessio Mellina at nearly 12 years, several others at six-plus) read as "stale" to keyword scanners, even though you were shipping across completely different engines and project phases. Fragment the single role into project-based sub-entries so an ATS reads it as multiple roles.

Instead of:

• Ninja Theory, Technical Sound Director, 2014 to 2026

Try:

• Ninja Theory, Technical Sound Director, Senua, 2022 to 2026
• Ninja Theory, Technical Sound Director, Hellblade II, 2019 to 2022
• Ninja Theory, Senior Sound Designer, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, 2014 to 2017

Same employer, same person. Different keywords, different engines, different scopes. The ATS now sees three roles with distinct skill clusters, and the human reader sees progression.

The weird problem: Senua might ship under someone else's logo

Write a conditional credit line now, so you can activate it the moment the IP moves. Xbox has signaled it wants to keep Senua alive, and precedent (Halo moving to a different studio) suggests the franchise could ship with a different team. Your work may appear in a shipped product under a logo that is not Ninja Theory and not yours.

The phrasing pattern that holds up:

• "Contributed to pre-production and vertical slice of [title] at Ninja Theory prior to studio transition in 2026."
• "Original combat system design for [title]; shipped version maintained by [new studio] from 2027."

Keep a dated, timestamped internal portfolio now, while you still have severance-period access. Screenshots of your Perforce submits, Jira tickets, and internal wiki pages are the paper trail that lets you claim credit two years from now when the game ships, or does not.

Three resumes, not one

Write a studio-targeted resume, a cross-industry resume, and a contract resume, because the 48% unemployed figure means you will likely need more than one search channel. 76% of UK devs are considering leaving the sector, per TIGA. That number is the backdrop to every search.

• Studio-targeted resume. One per employer on the six-studio shortlist. Each tuned to that studio's engine, genre, and known pain points. This is where per-posting tailoring lives, and where Refolk's per-posting rewrite is highest leverage.
• Cross-industry resume. Rewrites gameplay programming as "real-time simulation engineering," technical art as "procedural content pipelines," sound design as "spatial audio and interactive audio systems." Target studios include automotive HMI, defense sim, architectural viz, and VR health. The craft maps; the keywords do not.
• Contract resume. Short, outcome-dense, rate-ready. One page, project tiles, day rate implied by scope.

Running three parallel resumes manually is grim. Rewriting each one against every new posting is grimmer. That is the mechanical work worth offloading; your energy needs to go into the three studio phone screens you will actually get, not into reformatting bullet points at 1 a.m.

What to do in the next 14 days

Treat the first two weeks of your search as a fixed sequence, because the Ninja Theory story is still in the trade press and your name recognition peaks now. Specifically:

1. Day 1 to 3. Post publicly, with the project name, your discipline, and one concrete artifact. The named staff who posted on October 5 are the ones recruiters are already searching for.
2. Day 4 to 7. Build the Metasounds, Wwise, or Unreal sample project. Public link, with one hour of narration over it.
3. Day 8 to 10. Draft the three resume variants. Studio-targeted first; it is the hardest and the highest conversion.
4. Day 11 to 14. Reach out to the six UK shortlist studios directly. Not to recruiters. To the discipline lead by name. Attach the sample, not the resume. The resume comes after they reply.

The common failure pattern for AAA devs after a flagship cancellation is spending four weeks polishing a single generic CV and then blasting it. The GDC 48% stat is partly a function of that pattern. Specificity beats polish.

FAQ

Should I name Senua on my resume if the game may never ship?

Yes, name it, but in the role line, not the bullets. "Ninja Theory, Senior Gameplay Programmer, Senua (unreleased), 2022 to 2026" is honest and searchable. The bullets underneath should describe systems, decisions, and measurable outcomes that stand on their own. If a reviewer has never heard of the project, they can still evaluate your work. If they have, the project name adds context, not dependency.

How do I show audio or performance capture work when my demo reel sits on a Microsoft server?

Rebuild the demonstration, not the demo. For audio, publish a Metasounds or Wwise session project with real parameterization and a short narrated walkthrough. For performance capture (relevant to roles like Rachel Kimber's 4.5-year PCap tenure, or Xoe Subari's), build a 60-second clip in Unreal's MetaHuman sample using your retargeting and cleanup process. The point is to prove the method, not to show the finished shot. Hiring leads for these disciplines audit process competence, which travels.

Is relocating to the US a realistic plan given the 1.75x larger pool?

Usually no, for Cambridge-based mid-career ICs in 2026. The US pool is larger in the raw numbers from Refolk's index, but it is LA-concentrated at studios with thin visa sponsorship appetite this year. The higher-probability path is the UK six-studio shortlist (Playground Games, Build A Rocket Boy, Sports Interactive, Supermassive Games, Media Molecule, Epic Games UK), plus contract work and adjacent industries. Treat US applications as a parallel channel, not the primary one.

What if Senua ships two years from now under a different studio?

Document everything you can now, while you still have access, and keep a dated internal portfolio. When the game ships, update your resume with the conditional credit phrasing: "Contributed to pre-production and vertical slice of [title] at Ninja Theory prior to studio transition in 2026." Your Perforce history, Jira tickets, and internal design docs are the paper trail that supports the claim. A future hiring manager at the new studio will often be the fastest to recognize and reward that credit.