Senior Technical Artist - Tools and Pipeline - Unpublished R&D Product

At Riot, we believe in putting players first. Our Sydney-based team is partnering globally to build next-generation features and technology on an exciting Unpublished R&D Title. The team focuses on supporting the game's visual targets and content production needs - helping our artists to realize a vibrant and rich world for players to be immersed and express themselves in.

As a Senior Technical Artist, Tools & Pipeline, you’ll shape the creative engine that powers our teams - defining and elevating end-to-end workflows across disciplines including Character Art, Animation, Environment Art, Audio, and VFX. You’ll be a strategic partner to artists, Technical Art, and Engineering, evaluating tools and pipelines, clarifying production requirements, and ensuring our workflows enable creativity at scale. Your work will directly impact how ideas move from concept to shipped content, empowering multiple teams to operate efficiently in parallel production streams.

In this role, you’ll help stand up and sustain scalable tools and processes, providing hands-on technical support while gathering data and feedback to continuously improve the artist experience. You’ll build strong cross-disciplinary relationships to uncover pain points and guide meaningful system and pipeline improvements. As an active member of Riot’s Technical Art community, you’ll mentor fellow TAs, contribute to craft growth, and foster a culture of knowledge sharing through clear documentation and open feedback. By setting clear goals, offering actionable direction, and championing continuous improvement, you’ll ensure our workflows not only support today’s production but evolve to meet the ambitions of tomorrow.

You will report to the Manager, Technical Art, and work closely with the Tech Art Director and other members of the team abroad.

Responsibilities:

• Define and level up the end-to-end workflow for our many creative disciplines, such as Character Art, Animation, Environment Art, Audio, and VFX
• Collaborate with Technical Art and Engineering partners to support artist needs, including evaluating tools and workflows, and communicating requirements for production.
• Help stand up and maintain scalable artist tools and workflows to support multiple teams in parallel production streams.
• Provide technical support to artists working from our art workflows, collecting data to further improve the tools they are using, making recommendations and improvements where necessary
• Be an active member of the Tech Art community within Riot, participate in craft-focused meetings and events, and actively mentor for other Technical Artists in their craft
• Build close relationships with artists and engineers to understand needs, identify pain points, and help guide workflow, pipeline, and system improvements.
• Spread knowledge of the team’s processes through documentation and help teams expand their technical know-how
• Consistently give and take constructive feedback, direct next steps, and communicate clear goals and outcomes to your team

Required Qualifications: 

• 6+ years of professional experience as a technical artist in games or related industries.
• Professional experience in content creation and tool development for DCC tools, with particular emphasis on Autodesk Maya and Substance Suite workflows. 
• Professional experience working in Unreal Engine 5.
• Highly proficient in Python tool development, with a particular focus on building scalable, maintainable, and high-performance tools for a variety of artist use-cases.
• Professional experience with modern UI frameworks such as PySide & PyQt.
• Strong understanding of art workflows and the ability to translate artistic needs into technical requirements.
• Highly proficient communication skills and capacity to act as an ambassador between art and engineering.
• Superb critical thinking skills, particularly as it pertains to translating artistic requirements to sustainable workflow design; proactive, responsible, and comfortable owning ambiguous or evolving problem spaces.

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience with C++ and UMG for Unreal Engine 5.
• Experience with Houdini, Blender, ZBrush, 3DS Max, or Adobe Creative Suite.
• Excellent UI/UX design and front-end development (especially Qt/PyQt).
• Strong understanding of performance considerations for modern hardware and optimization techniques required for delivering a scalable, high performance product.
• Experience working on a large-scale, AAA game with a sizable, cross-disciplinary team.
• Experience with character rigging and animation pipelines.
• Curiosity around how AI-assisted workflows may improve content production efficiency and artist experience. 

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this could be your role!

Our Perks:

At Riot we strongly believe in work / life balance, and we encourage that with our open paid time off policy, paid parental leave (for both primary and secondary carers) and flexible work schedules to fit your lifestyle. We also believe that work should be fun, we have co-op gaming areas, a play fund so you can broaden and deepen your knowledge of players and community, and all the snacks you would ever need to power through your day (even healthy snacks!). And that’s not all we offer, there’s also:

• Medical Insurance that covers you and your dependents
• Employee Assistance Program
• Wellness fund
• Donation matching of time and money to registered charities
• Learning and Development opportunities

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experience or you’re supporting the company as a whole, everyone at Riot is part of our mission. And just like in our games, we’re better when we work together. Our goal is to create collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective everyday. If that sounds like the kind of place you want to work, we’re looking forward to your application.