EA Sports NHL Franchise — Hockey Ultimate Team

The problem

Hockey Ultimate Team (HUT) is the mode that keeps EA Sports NHL’s live-service economy running — and it ships new content, flows, and UI on an annual cadence across three console generations of players. Every release has to hold up under player load, survive a full production cycle without breaking neighboring systems, and still feel responsive on hardware from PS4 to Series X. That’s a UI engineering problem and a feature design problem at the same time: the code has to scale, and the flow has to feel good.

What I built

Across EA Sports NHL 24, NHL 25, and NHL 26, I worked inside Frostbite building and optimizing the UI systems behind HUT — the screens, flows, and feature updates that make up the mode’s day-to-day player experience. That meant:

• Building scalable UI systems in Frostbite that survived three consecutive annual ship cycles without a rewrite.
• Designing and optimizing HUT features and game flows for NHL 25 and NHL 26, using player feedback and engagement data to guide changes — not just implementing someone else’s spec, the “UI Game Developer” title undersold how much feature design was actually part of the job.
• Working closely with UI/UX designers and artists to catch and fix player-facing issues before launch — the kind of issue that only shows up when design intent, art, and engineering constraints collide.

Key decisions

• Returning to the team for a second tour (Jan 2024 – May 2025) after an initial stint (Nov 2022 – Aug 2023) meant inheriting systems I’d helped shape a year earlier and having to balance backward compatibility against the temptation to just rebuild. I prioritized incremental, reviewable changes over a rewrite, given how much of HUT’s economy logic depends on those systems staying stable through a live season.
• Holding a strict coding standard on a legacy-adjacent AAA codebase — where “ship the feature” pressure usually wins — paid off directly in the metric below: cleaner code was faster to extend, not just nicer to read.

Outcome

Cut UI implementation time by 15% on a codebase spanning three annual titles (NHL 24, NHL 25, NHL 26) across PS4/PS5/Xbox One/Xbox Series X — freeing up more time for actual design iteration. The systems held up across launch on all three titles without a platform-specific UI rewrite.