Lead Technical Artist (Real-Time Games | Art & Engineering)

Accountabilities:

You will lead technical art development across rendering, optimization, tools, and production pipelines, ensuring that artistic goals are supported by robust and scalable technical solutions. Your responsibilities will include:

• Technical Art Leadership: Lead and support technical artists across rendering, shaders, tools, optimization, and production workflows. Establish technical standards, quality benchmarks, and best practices while mentoring team members and providing constructive feedback.

• Art and Engineering Alignment: Collaborate with Art Directors, Technical Directors, artists, engineers, and production teams to translate creative ambitions into practical technical requirements and maintainable solutions.

• Rendering and Shader Development: Develop and improve real-time materials, shaders, and rendering workflows. Investigate visual inconsistencies, rendering issues, and performance bottlenecks to maintain high visual quality.

• Performance Optimization: Optimize geometry, materials, textures, lighting, visual effects, and asset pipelines. Define performance budgets and validation processes suited to target platforms, helping teams understand rendering constraints and make informed decisions.

• Tools and Automation: Design and develop artist-friendly tools, automation systems, validators, and procedural workflows that improve production efficiency and consistency.

• Pipeline Development: Improve asset creation, import, setup, and in-engine implementation processes. Partner with engineers to integrate technical art solutions into production systems and ensure they remain reliable at scale.

• Prototyping and Implementation: Explore new technical approaches, validate their effectiveness, and take successful prototypes through to stable production use.

• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Maintain clear technical documentation and encourage knowledge sharing to improve team capabilities and consistency across projects.

• Cross-Disciplinary Coordination: Serve as a bridge between art, engineering, and production, collaborating with distributed teams and external development partners.

• Technical Planning: Support estimation, prioritization, and planning for technical art initiatives. Identify risks early, resolve recurring production bottlenecks, and continuously improve workflows.

Requirements:

You are an experienced technical art professional who combines strong real-time graphics expertise with hands-on development skills and proven leadership capabilities. You can troubleshoot complex technical challenges, support multidisciplinary teams, and build scalable workflows that balance artistic quality with performance requirements. The ideal candidate will bring:

• At least seven years of professional experience in technical art or a closely related game development discipline.

• Proven experience as a Lead Technical Artist, a Senior Technical Artist with leadership responsibilities, or in an equivalent role.

• Experience contributing to commercially released games.

• Strong knowledge of real-time rendering, shaders, materials, lighting, and graphics optimization.

• Professional experience with Unity3D, Unreal Engine, or comparable real-time engines.

• Strong scripting or programming skills in Python, C#, HLSL, or equivalent technologies.

• Experience developing technical art tools, automation systems, and scalable production workflows.

• A thorough understanding of real-time asset pipelines and platform-specific performance constraints.

• Strong debugging, profiling, and technical problem-solving skills.

• Experience mentoring technical artists and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams.

• The ability to translate creative requirements into robust, maintainable technical solutions.

• Excellent communication skills and fluency in English.

Bonus Skills:

• In-depth experience with Unity URP/HDRP or Unreal Engine rendering systems.

• Experience optimizing graphics for mobile GPUs and other performance-constrained platforms.

• Knowledge of procedural content generation, Houdini, or node-based production tools.

• Experience developing custom rendering features, compute shaders, or GPU-driven workflows.

• Familiarity with character systems, visual effects pipelines, and technical animation.

• Experience establishing technical art departments, workflows, or team-wide standards.

• Previous experience working in international co-development environments.

Benefits:

• Creative and technical ownership: Take meaningful responsibility for technical art quality, tools, and production standards.

• Technical leadership opportunities: Lead challenging initiatives and influence how game production workflows are designed and improved.

• Cross-functional collaboration: Work directly with experienced artists, engineers, and creative directors.

• Remote flexibility: Join a remote-friendly, international working environment.

• Competitive compensation: Receive a competitive package, with specific details depending on the agreed contract.

• Flexible contract options: Explore arrangements suited to long-term collaboration.

• Professional development: Grow your expertise while contributing to technically challenging game development projects.

• Supportive studio culture: Participate in annual team retreats and collaborate within a supportive creative environment.