Member Article

Double Eleven Doubles Its Team

Games developer and publisher Double Eleven have announced they have doubled the size of their team, having welcomed their 200th employee.

The company, which launched 12 years ago from humble beginnings in a loft, has remotely recruited 103 new crew members to its Teesside Headquarters and grown its Kuala Lumpur studio to 20 in the last twelve months alone.

This growth has resulted from recruiting world-class talent locally, nationally, and internationally from America, Japan, Europe, and many other countries.

Double Eleven has brought experience from outside the games industry to support their scale of growth, including welcoming Iain Farrell, who joined from Analox as programme manager and Sarah Lowe from Mitsubishi Chemicals as training & development manager. All non-development teams have seen growth, including publishing, people & culture and IT and operations.

The company has gained a worldwide reputation for being trusted with some of the world’s biggest IPs. It is currently collaborating on Minecraft Dungeons with Mojang Studios and Prison Architect with Paradox Interactive, as well as other unannounced projects for Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5. It recently launched the Rust Console Edition and is managing a vast community of players.

Lee Hutchinson, founder and CEO of Double Eleven, said, “Our recent growth has been phenomenal; it’s a reflection of the increasing scale and complexity of the type of projects we work on. We’ve built new teams and created new roles within the organisation to support our online services and infrastructure needs, people development and, most importantly, wellbeing. We are quite comfortable recruiting outside the game industry to find individuals we believe have the right capabilities and experience to help us grow and advance different business areas.”

“We have reviewed over 1,700 applications, and throughout the pandemic, our IT heroes have sourced, set up and shipped over £450,000 worth of high-spec equipment and office wear to ensure each team member has everything they need to thrive while we work remotely.”

During this time, the company has also made further investment in quality assurance engineering and process automation, opened a new development studio in Kuala Lumpur and expanded its facilities in its Teesside based headquarters.

Not stopping there, the company will recruit an additional 100 staff over the next 12 months. Making it by size, one of the top three independent, UK headquartered games publisher and developer in the UK.

Lee added, “We’re building Double Eleven our way; with a people before profit philosophy which heavily influences the business and people decisions we make. It’s benefited our games and their results.

“We’ve recently created an Employee Diversity and Equality Network group to provide a safe space to debate topics centred around equality, diversity and inclusion, and it’s already resulted in new ways to improve the accessibility of our recruitment and onboarding process.

“With 15+ different nationalities in our team, we truly believe that diversity creates great games.”

Putting the company’s philosophy and culture at the core of how they operate is resulting in happy employees. With a Glassdoor company rating of 4.9 out of 5, Double Eleven scores highly with anonymous employee reviews and 95% of them said they would recommend working there to a friend. Lee also holds a 100% CEO approval rating on the site.

Opportunities at Double Eleven are available across various disciplines within the UK and Kuala Lumpur, and some roles qualify for 100% remote working.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lisa Holt .