Every tech and IT company in Sheffield

February 28, 2026

Sheffield has always been the doe-eyed ingenue compared to the oi-oi-oi brashness of Manchester and whatever it is that Leeds is. Many are attracted by the climbing and the trees. Fewer are attracted by the local tech industry.

I’ve worked remotely since moving to Sheffield four years ago, so I’ve never had much reason to care about the local scene. That changed when I was nearly made redundant and suddenly found myself asking: what software companies are actually based in Sheffield? Turns out the answer wasn’t easy to find. There’s no single page listing the IT and tech companies here, what they do, or what kind of developer jobs they offer. So I made this one.

This is every Sheffield-based company I can find that might plausibly hire software engineers, web developers or designers. I’ve excluded recruiters and pure marketing agencies. Only places where you’d actually write code or push pixels. I used agents to fetch a lot of this data, so there may be slight inaccuracies. This is our future now.

I’m not tracking individual job openings. For those check Sheffield.digital’s jobs list. But it never hurts to get in touch directly with people who look interesting.

The TL;DR: Sheffield doesn’t have a deep bench of big tech employers. If you want a FAANG salary and a ball pit you’re looking at Manchester or Leeds. But it has a surprisingly good startup scene, a proper game development heritage, and a few genuinely world-class companies tucked away in business parks you’ve never heard of.

The organisations

Before the companies themselves, a few organisations worth knowing about if you’re looking for software developer jobs in Sheffield or just trying to plug into the scene.

Sheffield.digital: the city’s tech industry association. The website is useful for finding companies. I haven’t been to any events myself but would love a social!

Sheffield Technology Parks: incubator for science and technology firms. Another good place to find interesting companies.

Kollider: tech incubator and coworking space at Castle House, powered by Barclays Eagle Lab. Also home to the National Videogame Museum.

Front End Sheffield: a plug for my favourite Sheffield meetup <3.

The big ones

The biggest IT and tech companies in Sheffield. These are the places with established engineering teams that hire regularly.

Arm: yes, that Arm. Their Sheffield office brings together Central Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Architecture and Technology. Hires SoC design engineers, verification engineers and performance analysts.

Twinkl: online educational resources. Sheffield’s largest homegrown tech employer, with a big engineering team hiring web devs, mobile devs, QA, designers and data engineers.

Sumo Digital: one of the UK’s biggest game studios. Best known for Sackboy: A Big Adventure (BAFTA winner) and the Sonic racing games. Hires game programmers, artists, designers, QA and technical artists. More on the gaming scene below.

Tes: education technology platform for timetabling, behaviour management and resources. 13 million educators globally. HQ is London but Sheffield is a significant engineering hub with full-stack, front-end, back-end, QA, product and design roles. Hybrid.

Pendo: product analytics and in-app guidance platform. Acquired Sheffield-based Receptive in 2019 and kept the team as its European engineering centre. Software engineers and product managers.

HSBC: major tech hub in Sheffield with DevOps, IT architects, front-end and back-end developers, and cyber security teams. Runs technology graduate programmes here covering software engineering, data, cyber and technical BA. Hybrid.

Plusnet: my aunt’s ISP.

Cirata (f.k.a. WANdisco): used to be known as WANdisco until a calamity. The Sheffield Tribune asks “Sheffield-based data management company WANdisco is now valued at more than $1bn after its shares rose more than 500% in less than a year. What’s their secret?”. The answer was massive fraud.

CGI (f.k.a. BJSS): IT and business services consultancy.

Autodesk: well-known design technology company with a Sheffield satellite office.

Zoo Digital: globalisation and localisation services for TV and streaming. Most roles are in translation and dubbing rather than pure software, but they do have a tech team.

Certara (Simcyp Division): pharmaceutical simulation software. 130+ people in Sheffield including 80+ scientists and software developers building PBPK modelling software used by 37 leading pharma companies. Hires C#, C++ and WPF developers. Based at Acero.

Jaywing: data science and analytics agency. ~300 staff, 1 in 7 is a data scientist. Founded 1999, headquartered in Sheffield. Now part of Stubben Edge Group. Hires data scientists, analysts and developers. Flexible working.

Gaming

Sheffield has real pedigree in games. Gremlin Graphics was one of the UK’s biggest studios before being swallowed by Infogrames in 1999, and Sumo Digital rose from its ashes. It’s one of the few cities outside London where you can plausibly build a career as a game developer. Beyond Sumo:

Steel City Interactive: created Undisputed, the first major boxing game in over a decade. Founded 2020 by the Habib brothers, now 80+ employees with a second studio in Leamington Spa. Hires AI programmers, physics programmers and producers. Hybrid.

Boneloaf: the studio behind Gang Beasts, the brilliantly chaotic multiplayer party game. Founded 2011 by the Brown brothers. Small team.

Ten24: 3D scanning and photogrammetry for games, film and TV. Credits include Final Fantasy, Hellblade, Baldur’s Gate III and Doctor Who.

There’s also an informal indie scene organised around Shindig (Sheffield Indie Game Developers), but these are mostly solo devs and micro-studios.

The startups

This is where it gets interesting. Sheffield has a growing cluster of funded startups, many spun out of the University of Sheffield or the AMRC. If you want to work at a startup without paying London rent, it’s worth paying attention.

Edtech

Sheffield punches well above its weight in education technology, presumably because Twinkl proved you could build a serious edtech company here.

Chalkie: AI-powered lesson planning. Teachers save 7+ hours a week. Used by 100,000+ teachers across the UK, US and Australia. Founded by ex-Tutorful founder Mark Hughes. Raised £1m pre-seed from Triple Point Ventures.

Tutorful: UK’s largest tutoring marketplace. 11,000+ active tutors. Series A funded, ~55 staff at Sheffield HQ. Founded 2015.

Fintech & legaltech

Bumper: buy-now-pay-later for car repairs. 5,000+ dealerships across Europe including Volvo, Ford, Audi, JLR and Porsche. Moved HQ from London to Sheffield in 2022. Raised £40m in 2024 from Shell Ventures, JLR InMotion Ventures and Porsche Ventures. One of the better-funded startups in the city.

FinLegal: platform for managing mass legal claims (class actions). Used by Leigh Day and Maurice Blackburn. Processed over 2 million claims. Raised £5m total. Founded 2019.

Deep tech & university spinouts

This is the category that surprised me most. Sheffield’s universities — particularly the engineering and materials science departments — are spinning out some genuinely frontier companies.

BOW: robot-agnostic software development kit that lets you program any robot from any OS. University of Sheffield spinout. Raspberry Pi co-founder Liz Upton chairs the board. Raised £4m seed led by Northern Gritstone.

Opteran: reverse-engineers insect brain algorithms onto silicon for autonomous machines. Tested with Airbus for space rovers. ~40 employees. University of Sheffield spinout. Raised ~$12m.

SCI Semiconductor: building the world’s first commercial memory-safe cybersecurity chips, based on Microsoft’s CHERIoT-Ibex core. Google Research is a customer. Raised £2.5m. Founded by ex-Arm engineer Haydn Povey.

Productive Machines: AI digital twins for optimising CNC milling. SaaS product deployed at Renault and MASA Aerospace. AMRC spinout. Raised £3m.

Iceotope: precision liquid cooling for data centres. Founded 2005. Runs the industry’s first liquid cooling research lab, here in Sheffield. British Patient Capital invested £5m.

Sitehop: hardware-accelerated network encryption for quantum-resilient cybersecurity. Products live in 7 countries. Raised £13.5m total. Founded in a pub.

Ioetec: IoT cybersecurity. Multi-layer encryption for low-power devices. Founded by GCHQ alumni. Founded 2015.

Ossila: lab equipment and scientific instruments with accompanying software. University of Sheffield spinout. Based at Solpro Business Park.

SaaS & platforms

Tribepad: applicant tracking system used by BBC, Tesco, KFC and the Church of England. Processes 9 million applications a year across 120+ countries. Raised £12m from BGF. Based at Sheffield Innovation Centre. Founded 2008. Hires web developers, QA and product roles.

The Floow: telematics platform for motor insurance. Pioneered using smartphones as driving behaviour sensors. Offices in Sheffield and Detroit. Founded 2012. Acquired by Otonomo in 2022 but still operating from Sheffield.

UniHomes: student accommodation platform with all bills included. Founded 2015 by Sheffield students.

Sport:80: SaaS for sports governing bodies to manage memberships, certifications and events. 80+ clients including British Fencing, USA Archery and USA Shooting. Founded 2012.

FourJaw: cloud-based manufacturing analytics with plug-and-play IoT hardware for real-time machine monitoring. AMRC spinout. 140+ manufacturers globally. Raised £1.8m.

Tickets for Good: platform distributing free and discounted live event tickets to NHS workers and charity employees. 620k+ members, 1m+ tickets distributed. Founded 2019.

LabLogic Systems: instrumentation and software for life science, nuclear medicine and radiation safety. Products in 50+ countries. 40+ years in business. Recently opened new Sheffield HQ.

Hardware with software teams

These companies are primarily hardware, but they all have software engineering roles.

Pimoroni: maker electronics company in the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Designs boards, kits and accessories. 30+ staff across two Sheffield properties. Hires firmware engineers and web developers. Founded 2012.

Phlux Technology: ultra-low-noise infrared sensors for LiDAR and telecoms. University of Sheffield spinout. Raised £9m Series A.

AegiQ: full-stack photonic quantum computing — chips, hardware and software. University of Sheffield spinout. Raised £3.5m+. Hires software engineers (Python), quantum application scientists and interns.

Agencies and consultancies

If you’re a web developer in Sheffield, the agencies are a solid option. There are a lot of them and they tend to hire more consistently than the startups.

Did I miss anyone?

This is a living document. If you know of a Sheffield-based tech company that I’ve missed, or if something here is out of date, please get in touch. I’m especially interested in companies that hire software engineers, web developers, data engineers or designers.

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