Contact person: UE4.27.2 Loading Cooked Materials in Editor Fix

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Location: Detmold, Germany

Budget: Recommended by industry experts

Time to start: As soon as possible

Project description:
"I need an experienced Unreal Engine C++ developer to bring the UE 5.3 fix that lets the editor open cooked material assets back to UE 4.27.2. Right now, any project that was cooked in 4.27.2 when having cooked materials loaded back into the editor cause a serial size mismatch for the shader types.

The fix can't be easily backported because:
- it would break compatibility for unmodified UE 4.27.2 projects, the shader format changed significantly that backporting it isn't enough, it needs to be actually modified that we can load cooked materials from these unmodified engines without changing the format for modding purposes.

Here is what you’ll be working with:
- Engine version is UE 4.27.2 from the Epic Games GitHub, this fix is meant to only target PC builds, no need to fix anything for consoles or mobile as these use different graphics API's not compatible on PC.
- C++, no actual shader code needs to be modified here.

Your goal is to identify how to fix the 4.27.2 implementation (possibly referencing the 5.3 commit) to work with materials cooked in UNMODIFIED 4.27.2 engines. To test if your fix worked, simply create a blank project with a new material, put some default engine textures into the material, cook the project and drag the cooked material (.uexp, .uasset) back into the editor. If the material successfully shows the same as the uncooked material and the console does not output errors like:

"LogShaders: Error: Mismatch size for type FMeshMaterialShaderMap, compiled size is 112, loaded size is 104"

Then the fix should be good to go.

Please include:
1. A concise Git diff or forked branch showing the back-ported changes.
2. Build instructions for a vanilla 4.27.2 source checkout.
3. A short write-up of the files or subsystems touched (Renderer, ShaderCompiler, Serialization, etc.) so I can maintain the fix going forward.

If you’ve tackled version-compatibility issues or serialization quirks in UE before, mention it—proven insight will speed up selection." (client-provided description)