Senior Technical Artist (Gaming, Film, AR/VR experience a must)

Position Summary
The Senior Technical Artist is instrumental in creating, building, and delivering key content and workflows contributing with artists, designers, and engineers to achieve both artistic and optimization goals in the creation of next-generation immersive experiences. This role acts as a key liaison between the content and engineering teams and facilitates problem solving, strategies, and implementations between departments.

What You’ll Do
Conceive, prototype, implement technically advanced visuals and procedural systems
Contribute to look development of the highest-caliber real-time art by creating shaders, lighting and particle effects, and partnering with character and environment artists on asset lookdev
Partner with the art and engineering teams to understand, define and manage project technical requirements and project asset production
Assist artists and designers via tool development, and in concept testing of new ideas, and building of rapid prototypes

Look/dev passes of environmental supporting elements, atmospherics, lighting, post-processes and other VFX for scene / level. Actively participate in optimizations, identify, triage, and fix bugs as required
Explore and implement new tools and techniques to continuously push the visual bar to the leading edge using scripting (Blueprints, Python) and rapid prototypes
Mentor and collaborate with other Technical Artists to improve studio tools and pipelines
Proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and seek out buy-in from the team regarding implementation strategy
Provide hands-on support to the development team for asset performance profiling and optimization. Identify, triage, and fix bugs as required
Standardize and improve best practices for production of assets, materials, shaders, LODs, asset streaming, collisions, and interactions
Innovate discipline workflows and keep up to date on new tools/applications/trends in the industry

What We’re Looking For

1. 5+ years experience in games, film, television, AR/VR or related fields
2. Experience with programming/scripting languages such as Python, C++, C#, Java, VEX, or MEL and a proficiency with linear algebra
3. Strong 3D art skills with experience and deep understanding of optimizing and constructing modeling, texturing, uv mapping, animation, shading, lighting and particle effects for real-time workflows
4. Proficient in Maya, Houdini, Blender, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and/or Photoshop
5. Unreal Engine: extensive experience working with UE workflows: Blueprints, material networks, real-time lighting and simulations, post processing
6. Shaders: in-depth knowledge of real-time shader implementations, limitations of shaders in VR, strong knowledge of PBR pipelines and subsurface shaders
7. Materials: extensive experience in the development, authoring & organization of efficient node-based materials, hierarchies, material functions, and custom shaders via the UE4 material editor
8. Familiarity with profiling tools in the examination & diagnosis of performance issues
9. Team-player mindset: open & receptive to ideas, constructive feedback, direction and changes
10. Ability to work independently and efficiently under tight deadlines; works well with direction, but also is self-motivated and will seek out or devise solutions to unexpected challenges

Nice to have:
Passion for playing and making games, experience or interest in VR and AR
Visual Effects production / pipeline experience
Interest and capacity to work with proprietary toolsets

A portfolio / reel submission - including a detailed breakdown of your work in each section - is required with all applications