Hire the Top 3% of Freelance Virtual Reality Developers
Toptal is a marketplace for top virtual reality developers. Top companies and startups choose Toptal Virtual Reality freelancers for their mission-critical software projects.
Madelyn is a full-stack developer and technical writer specializing in mobile development, AR/VR, games, and data ethics. As a software engineer at Meta, she worked on various products, including the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Facebook News Feed, and Meta VR store. Madelyn is the former lead editor for the Toptal Engineering Blog. Her writing on technology and data ethics, which has focused on AI, AR/VR, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), has won awards and been published by the IEEE.
Dmitry is an experienced software developer specializing in Unity. He can develop 3D, 2D, virtual reality, and augmented reality applications for Android, iPhone, Windows, and Mac. Dmitry also has extensive experience debugging performance, setting up animations, suggesting user experience improvements, and many other associated tasks.
Rick is an entrepreneurial leader with a background in gaming and immersive technologies. Rick has experience leading and developing defense simulations, video games, and theme park attractions in larger corporate environments and is always interested in new industries. Over the last several years, Rick's also worked in startups as a leader and primary technologist—covering code, architecture, design, and maintenance.
Milos is a highly motivated game developer with expertise in the Unity game engine. He has successfully worked on multiple projects as a developer and gained solid experience in 3D, 2D, extended reality, augmented reality, virtual reality, visual effects, animations, and single-player and multiplayer games. Milos has published many games on App Store and Play Store.
Hristo is a software developer and virtual reality mastermind, spending his workdays dreaming of the future and living it in virtual reality. He always tries to combine the pieces the right way to unlock their full potential and create what was previously unimaginable. Hristo has prototyped and tested different VR use-cases, figured out the most immersive and impactful solutions, and built bespoke 3D, VR, AR, and mobile apps for clients. He will be a great asset to any team.
Ahmad is a certified Unity expert with more than a decade of experience as a software developer. Most of his experience was as a game developer and virtual reality (VR) specialist. He co-founded a VR agency in 2017, where he led a team of talented developers and artists to create virtual reality games and training experiences that meet the criteria set by his clients. Ahmad believes the true potential of VR is not limited to entertainment but also training and communication.
Tigran is a senior software developer with about a decade of professional experience. Tigran has a progressive track record with expertise in developing online applications, internal tools, data protocols, data encryption, and security. Skilled in large data processing along with motion graphics and web development, Tigran is a developer who can deliver high-performing products.
Vineet is a seasoned engine developer with 6+ years of experience, specializing in Unity and Unreal Engine. He has led teams in various augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and WebGL projects, successfully creating applications for iPhone, Android, Meta Quest, and Microsoft HoloLens 2. Passionate about merging tech with real-world impact, Vineet is eager to embrace new challenges, working hand-in-hand with clients to innovate with purpose.
Oscar is an expert front-end developer with over ten years of experience leading, designing, implementing, and deploying web projects of various sizes and complexities. He believes that proficiency in the overall process, good communication with the client, and superb development skills are crucial to a project's success. Oscar looks forward to new challenges where he can bring the client's idea to life.
Dan is a Unity developer with over six years of experience in most platforms, having deployed games and apps for PC, console, mobile, AR headsets, and custom platforms. As a Unity Certified Expert, Dan always looks forward to new, exciting projects that will challenge or enhance industry standards and stand the test of time.
Ibraheem is a passionate developer with a keen acumen for learning who solves unique and engaging tech problems, making great projects come to life. He has developed an escape room in a bus, a VR roller coaster, and an AR presentation tool for auto shows, just to name a few. He has proven experience in everything from programming languages and environments, mechatronics, computer animation, VFX, and CAD modeling to CFD and FEA analysis and even some welding and fabrication.
Virtual reality is going mainstream, resulting in a lot of demand for VR talent and even more hype. This leaves a veritable flood of VR developer resumes to wade through. How can you know which ones are right for your project?
We recently interviewed hiring executives from some of the most successful VR production houses and distilled their wisdom down into this handy hiring guide.
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Despite accelerating demand for coders, Toptal prides itself on almost Ivy League-level vetting.
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Testimonials
Tripcents wouldn't exist without Toptal. Toptal Projects enabled us to rapidly develop our foundation with a product manager, lead developer, and senior designer. In just over 60 days we went from concept to Alpha. The speed, knowledge, expertise, and flexibility is second to none. The Toptal team were as part of Tripcents as any in-house team member of Tripcents. They contributed and took ownership of the development just like everyone else. We will continue to use Toptal. As a startup, they are our secret weapon.
Brantley Pace
CEO & Co-Founder
I am more than pleased with our experience with Toptal. The professional I got to work with was on the phone with me within a couple of hours. I knew after discussing my project with him that he was the candidate I wanted. I hired him immediately and he wasted no time in getting to my project, even going the extra mile by adding some great design elements that enhanced our overall look.
Paul Fenley
Director
The developers I was paired with were incredible -- smart, driven, and responsive. It used to be hard to find quality engineers and consultants. Now it isn't.
Ryan Rockefeller
CEO
Toptal understood our project needs immediately. We were matched with an exceptional freelancer from Argentina who, from Day 1, immersed himself in our industry, blended seamlessly with our team, understood our vision, and produced top-notch results. Toptal makes connecting with superior developers and programmers very easy.
Jason Kulik
Co-founder
As a small company with limited resources we can't afford to make expensive mistakes. Toptal provided us with an experienced programmer who was able to hit the ground running and begin contributing immediately. It has been a great experience and one we'd repeat again in a heartbeat.
Stuart Pocknee
Principal
How to Hire Virtual Reality Developers Through Toptal
1
Talk to One of Our Client Advisors
A Toptal client advisor will work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics.
2
Work With Hand-selected Talent
Within days, we'll introduce you to the right virtual reality developer for your project. Average time to match is under 24 hours.
3
The Right Fit, Guaranteed
Work with your new virtual reality developer for a trial period (pay only if satisfied), ensuring they're the right fit before starting the engagement.
Find Experts With Related Skills
Access a vast pool of skilled developers in our talent network and hire the top 3% within just 48 hours.
Typically, you can hire a virtual reality developer with Toptal in about 48 hours. For larger teams of talent or Managed Delivery, timelines may vary. Our talent matchers are highly skilled in the same fields they’re matching in—they’re not recruiters or HR reps. They’ll work with you to understand your goals, technical needs, and team dynamics, and match you with ideal candidates from our vetted global talent network.
Once you select your virtual reality developer, you’ll have a no-risk trial period to ensure they’re the perfect fit. Our matching process has a 98% trial-to-hire rate, so you can rest assured that you’re getting the best fit every time.
How do I hire a virtual reality developer?
To hire the right virtual reality developer, it’s important to evaluate a candidate’s experience, technical skills, and communication skills. You’ll also want to consider the fit with your particular industry, company, and project. Toptal’s rigorous screening process ensures that every member of our network has excellent experience and skills, and our team will match you with the perfect virtual reality developers for your project.
How are Toptal virtual reality developers different?
At Toptal, we thoroughly screen our virtual reality developers to ensure we only match you with the highest caliber of talent. Of the more than 200,000 people who apply to join the Toptal network each year, fewer than 3% make the cut.
In addition to screening for industry-leading expertise, we also assess candidates’ language and interpersonal skills to ensure that you have a smooth working relationship.
When you hire with Toptal, you’ll always work with world-class, custom-matched virtual reality developers ready to help you achieve your goals.
Can you hire virtual reality developers on an hourly basis or for project-based tasks?
You can hire virtual reality developers on an hourly, part-time, or full-time basis. Toptal can also manage the entire project from end-to-end with our Managed Delivery offering. Whether you hire an expert for a full- or part-time position, you’ll have the control and flexibility to scale your team up or down as your needs evolve. Our virtual reality developers can fully integrate into your existing team for a seamless working experience.
What is the no-risk trial period for Toptal virtual reality developers?
We make sure that each engagement between you and your virtual reality developer begins with a trial period of up to two weeks. This means that you have time to confirm the engagement will be successful. If you’re completely satisfied with the results, we’ll bill you for the time and continue the engagement for as long as you’d like. If you’re not completely satisfied, you won’t be billed. From there, we can either part ways, or we can provide you with another expert who may be a better fit and with whom we will begin a second, no-risk trial.
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How to Hire a Great Virtual Reality Developer
Hiring high-quality virtual reality (VR) developers are critical to the success of your project. Despite the variety of websites offering freelance VR services, there are still challenges that come with getting the right person to fill this role on your team.
You may be a hiring manager for the development team at a large corporation, or a small business looking for a passionate VR developer. In any case, your interview process is an important method for evaluating the talent you seek.
Both art and programming are critical to any immersive virtual reality project. Depending on the culture of your company, art and programming roles may be very tightly defined with little overlap, or very fluid with less distinction between them. This article specifically covers programmers, rather than positions such as 3D modelers, texture artists, and animators.
We took it upon ourselves to interview a few industry leaders to discuss the nuances of interviewing and hiring for virtual reality development. The developer that suits your project will be driven by what your VR company does, but there are common characteristics among all our sources for what they want from VR developers and how they choose to interview them.
Roles
Traditional VR engineering (whether game-related or not) is heavily influenced by the game development and app development communities. The roles within the team will often reflect this, but the culture of your company will ultimately decide how you delineate engineering roles within your team. In keeping with the language we encountered speaking to VR hiring managers, we’ve used terms such as “gameplay” and “game.” However, these roles are equally applicable to virtual reality applications that have nothing to do with gaming, such as interactive experiences, movies, and consumer spaces. VR engineering roles typically land in one of three categories:
1. Gameplay Engineers
A gameplay engineer is concerned with the ways in which a user interacts with a VR game and what they experience. They build the world of a game, but not the graphics. In other words, these engineers build the game itself rather than the technology the experience runs on.
Gameplay engineers would be responsible for things such as how the characters within a game experience behave, how the user interacts with the environment in the virtual reality app world, and the navigation of the user within the world.
An engine programmer is almost the exact opposite of a gameplay engineer. These programmers work on the low-level technology that the experience runs on, particularly the 3D technology that renders the experience.
They also focus on ensuring that performance is acceptable. This is especially important in VR, as low frame rates can cause nausea.
In modern VR, it’s rare that an engine programmer would be responsible for building the engine that the experience runs on in its entirety. It’s far more likely that they would be responsible for low-level interactions with the third-party engine used to develop the game, such as Unity, Unreal, or CryEngine.
3. High-Level Scripting Engineers
Scripting engineers have a similar role to gameplay engineers. They work at a very high level in languages such as Lua or UnrealScript. This is in contrast to gameplay engineers, who work in the same low-level language in which the game is written, usually C++.
In some VR app development environments, particularly Unity, there is less distinction between a high level scripting engineer and a gameplay engineer. This is because gameplay code tends to be written in the higher-level languages supported by Unity, like JavaScript or C#.
Each of the roles described above have formal training. Unlike other software development and programming specializations, it’s rare nowadays that someone has these specific VR development skills without having gone to school for a programming or computer science degree.
Beyond formal training, there are several traits you should hope to see in your candidates as you interview virtual reality developers. If you choose to give your candidate a technical interview, we suggest taking three to four hours.
Collaborative Potential
Any virtual reality experience has a complex real-time system behind it with many moving parts. The developer who thinks collaboratively will be considerate of other team members and be conscious of the workflow and pipeline.
Communication is critical, whether you are working in a small company or a large distributed team. Collaborative team members work well independently but are also not afraid to ask relevant questions and share insights that move development along efficiently.
Problem Solving
There are several ways to asses problem-solving acumen. As with other technical interviews, posing technical problems during the interview process is a good means to evaluate problem-solving skills. They’re a good tool for drawing out the interviewee’s thoughts on the subject matter. Help when necessary. Ask them to elaborate to glean more details about their thought process.
Some technical problems are universal, applying to any programming role. Others might be more specific to virtual worlds such as camera calculations, rendering problems, and character AI techniques. Additionally, you as an interviewer should evaluate how they think about performance as well as the correctness of the solution to the problem.
3D Math Skills
Some level of 3D math is needed for anyone involved in building a VR experience. That said, the exact level will depend on their role within your team.
Core engine programmers will require in-depth, sophisticated knowledge of all aspects of 3D math. This includes vector and matrix mathematics, and the mathematics of rendering, physics, and shaders.
On the other hand, gameplay and scripting engineers only require basic knowledge of how to use 3D vectors and transformations.
This section of your interview should be tailored to challenge their 3D math skills to a level suitable for the role to which they are applying. The questions should attempt to reveal their underlying knowledge of the principles involved, rather than expecting rote knowledge of 3D operations.
One example might be that they should be able to tell the difference between a cross product and a dot product and how to use them, but not necessarily know the exact sequence of operations to perform a cross product.
Speed
Remember, each frame of your virtual reality experience must run in 16.6 milliseconds, or nausea can result.
Virtual reality, like so much of our experience today, is dependent upon efficiency: Does the code run fast?
In addition to solving problems in 3D space using applied 3D math, the solutions must be graceful. Being mathematically correct is not good enough if the solution is inefficient.
For example, a brute-force solution to a mathematical search problem is unlikely to be practical, even though it’s mathematically correct. If you are presented with a solution like this in an interview, try to prompt the interviewee to build on the baseline brute-force solution and turn it into a more efficient and elegant solution.
Optimization is the key to a pleasant user experience. Remember, each frame of your virtual reality experience must run in 16.6 milliseconds, or nausea can result. This requires all members of your team to understand performance and optimization.
There are two aspects of this. There is theoretical Big-O notation—which any computer science graduate should understand—whereby you can express the theoretical time and space complexity of an algorithm. But there is also more practical, experiential knowledge that relates code to real-world performance.
The former can be assessed while posing the technical problems discussed in the previous “problem solving” section. Does the interviewee understand the complexity of the solution they present, and how that will impact its theoretical performance?
The latter is particularly important for low-level engine programmers and can be assessed by asking about the low-level performance repercussions of the code they write. Do they understand the performance ramifications of various levels of caching, for example, or the performance characteristics of a CPU versus a GPU?
Desire
A person who is desirous of a position in the field will have examples of passion projects. As an interviewer, take the time to look at the quality of the source code they have posted on open source repositories like GitHub or work samples they have provided to you. Are these projects easily compiled and run?
Desire is often illustrated by enthusiasm and the candidate’s willingness to intrinsically sharpen their skills. Ask questions about their passion projects and the code they have written for them in a way that lets them reveal their desire for working in the field of virtual reality.
A demo reel is not necessarily expected from a programmer, but it’s appreciated. If you are presented with a demo reel, ask questions about the technical details of implementing what is shown in the demo reel.
As mentioned above, depending on the culture of your company, you may have less delineation between VR programming and artistic roles. For any roles with artistic components to them, a demo reel is crucial, so expect to have to do an in-depth evaluation of them for your interview process.
Overall Value
Aside from technical skills and passion, there are some other important aspects to consider in assessing a candidate’s likely overall value to your team.
While you are looking for new team members, you can keep this tidbit in mind: During our interviews, the most common role hired for was a game engineer. The most difficult role to fill was that of a core engine programmer. As you interview talent, it’s important to know their value within the wider technology ecosystem. This will affect the number of competing offers they are likely to receive.
However, regardless of the likelihood of competing offers, you should endeavor to make your interview process as swift as possible. Be efficient about expressing the results to both successful and unsuccessful interviewees.
Existing Skills and Learning Quickly
It might seem obvious that the most attractive candidate is one who has a combination of skills to fill gaps where needed. However, as an interviewer, it might also be helpful to think through whether or not your candidate is teachable. A willingness and demonstrated ability to learn on the job is as important as showing a mastered versatile skillset. Your needs and budget will guide you in this way about the best talent to hire.
Long-Term and Short-Term Approaches
Every team has a budget and schedule including long- and short-term goals. A core engine programmer can be very valuable to your team because they possess a versatile skill set. During the interview process, consider the long- and short-term goals your hire will be able to help shape and sustain.
Some engineers may be excellent at fighting fires, but not necessarily good at re-architecting your technology to meet your long-term goals.
One aim of your interview process should be to establish how the interviewee fits both within your team and schedule. Sometimes your long- and short-term goals may require different hiring decisions. Some engineers may be excellent at fighting fires—i.e., solving immediate problems and bugs that are stopping your virtual reality project from shipping—but not necessarily good at re-architecting your technology to meet your long-term goals.
Likewise, an engineer with a vision for the architecture of your virtual reality technology may not be best suited to jumping in and fixing the high-priority JIRA item that’s currently hindering the completion of a project. Your interviews should aim at distinguishing between these two roles within your project.
Not all developers are going to fit neatly into either category. In fact, some may be able to carry out both roles well. As an interviewer, you should be aware of which of these roles you are trying to fill.
To identify engineers who are good at fighting fires and solving immediate problems talk to them about cases like this in their work history. Drill down into the technical details of difficult problems they have solved in previous jobs. What was the timeline in which those problems were solved? How did they approach solving the problem, and what were their specific contributions to the solution?
For a more visionary, architect role, ask questions to get a feel for their vision for the system as a whole. During prior projects, did they lead the process of producing the system architecture? Are they excited to contribute to the wider design of the software? And finally, are they able to clearly communicate their insights with those working alongside them?
Creative Ability
“Creativity” in VR engineering can be defined in two ways with regards to the interview hiring process. One can be visually creative, e.g., with effects; there is also the marrying of math and art. Someone else can be design-wise creative, enhancing gameplay, tuning character movement timing, making jumping mechanics have the correct feel…the list goes on!
To gain insight into your interviewee’s creative ability, you will need to combine the specific areas we covered earlier: Problem solving, 3D math skills, and desire. Do the answers given reflect a creative outlook in the interviewee, or a more linear way of thinking?
Pushing the Envelope
Virtual reality is a cutting-edge media where the rules are still being written, unlike media such as film where many conventions have been established for nearly a century. A creative engineer in the VR field must be prepared to write the rules and conventions that future VR creators will follow.
During your interview, inquire about the engineer’s thoughts toward more accessible virtual reality experiences. Ask about their ideas about the sustainability of the field. Their answers should help you gauge how innovative you can expect them to be.
Leveling Up Your Team in the VR Era
Interviewing full-time or part-time VR developers (and AR developers) can be challenging, but with the right lens, you can find the talent you need to compliment your team and realize your vision. In order for the field of virtual reality to grow and thrive, we need to create accessible, high-quality experiences that work with affordable VR technology hardware and VR headsets like the Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, or Oculus Rift.
Hunt for like-minded talent with a thirst for innovation, a heart for teamwork, and the ability to produce with minimal management oversight—there’s no other way to stay on the bleeding edge of the VR applications revolution!
We would like to thank Dave Alpert, CEO at Geopogo; Glen Egan, President and CEO of Sanzaru Games; and Alton Glass, Director and Owner of Glassrock Entertainment for their insights as we put together this article.