Andrew Mason

I’ve spent over 15 years focused on the craft of building fast, accessible UI using web standards. I work closely with designers on interaction and animation, prototyping in code and building tools to improve workflows. At Rare, I built game UI for Sea of Thieves and Everwild. At The Telegraph, I created Milton, an award-winning Figma plugin. At The Guardian, I delivered live data visualisations and led VR projects.

Skills

Experience

UI Engineer (contract) | Rare (Xbox Game Studio)

Nov 2024 – May 2026

Built game UI for Sea of Thieves and Everwild in TypeScript, SolidJS, CSS, and Sass, running on Coherent Gameface inside Unreal Engine.

• Built Custom Seas UI for Sea of Thieves Season 20: Free Camera, Quick Commands radial, and Command Menu spawn screens.
• Built Sea of Thieves' Enhanced Headphone Mode UI: a state-machine-driven flow for Embody's spatial audio, mapping plugin, setup, and menu states into the game.
• Designed and implemented a bespoke spatial navigation system and real-time HTML5 Canvas debug visualiser for Everwild's inventory HUD across gamepad, keyboard, and mouse.
• Defined TypeScript data contracts with the Unreal Engine team, covered by Jasmine unit tests.

UI Engineer (contract) | Rare (Xbox Game Studio)

Aug 2022 – Mar 2024

Built Sea of Thieves UI features and prototyped UI for Everwild in TypeScript, Sass, and Coherent Gameface.

• Shipped Guilds UI for Sea of Thieves Season Ten: built screens and components in TypeScript, defining data contracts between the UI, Unreal Engine, and remote services.
• Developed interactive Everwild prototypes with designers and engine programmers.
• Authored unit tests and TypeScript definitions for Unreal event models, and optimised the UI test suite to reduce runtime by 30%.
• Optimised in-game UI performance using DevTools and Xbox PIX captures across PC and Xbox consoles.

Senior Prototyper | The Telegraph

Jul 2018 – Apr 2022

Worked within the Product team, collaborating with designers and journalists to build web applications, authoring tools, and interactive stories.

• Created Milton, an award-winning open-source Figma plugin in TypeScript and React that exports Figma designs into responsive, self-contained HTML/SVG embeds.
• Developed “A Year in Lockdown”, an interactive scrolling story built with a custom in-browser editor, achieving over 100K views, a 15-minute average dwell time, and an SND award.
• Built an automated newsroom video-wall animating captures of the Telegraph's homepage and print paper using PixiJS, Node.js, Puppeteer, Google Cloud Functions, and Firebase.
• Built a Lottie animation tool in React enabling editors to create scroll-driven animations and export self-contained HTML embeds.

UI Engineer | Simpplr

Feb 2018 – May 2018

Built UI for an intranet application in React, Redux, and Immutable.js, backed by a Salesforce API.

• Built an interactive graph-based employee hierarchy component for navigating the organisation.
• Collaborated with the Salesforce backend team to define API schemas and testing.

Creative Technologist | The Guardian

Nov 2011 – Oct 2017

Part of the Interactive team, developing bespoke data visualisations and interactive experiences.

• Created live election data dashboards using D3.js, Node.js, and AWS S3.
• Built interactive web features including the 6x9 WebGL experience (Three.js) and audio-synchronised stories using the Web Audio API and CSS animations.
• Led technical delivery of virtual reality projects including 6x9 and Beat the Hustler, and oversaw external development of the Guardian VR platform.

Front-End Developer | BBC

Apr 2010 – Nov 2011

• Developed UI components for the BBC homepage redesign, producing WCAG AAA compliant code supporting a broad range of browsers.
• Collaborated with UX designers to prototype and validate UI interactions.

Senior Developer | Digitas (AKQA)

Mar 2008 – Apr 2010

• Led front-end development of a multilingual property ticketing system for Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, working alongside the project manager and Oracle CRM teams to evaluate and integrate competing ticketing backends.
• Built the promotional site for the Levi's flagship London store launch using WordPress.

Education

BA (Hons) Creative Multimedia | Teesside University

2001 – 2005

• Final-year dissertation: a solo point-and-click adventure game with an audio-only interface for visually impaired players, exploring accessible interaction design.
• Studied Human-Computer Interaction and multimedia creation, which continue to inform my interest in how people interact with interfaces and visual storytelling.

Personal

I closely follow web standards, browser engine development, and modern CSS and DOM APIs, and enjoy experimenting with LLMs and AI tooling. I'm interested in graphics and rendering technology across games and the web, particularly how techniques from one medium can benefit the other. Outside of work I tinker with personal web projects, electronics, and creative coding.