Senior / Staff Technical Artist – Materials, Lighting, Procedural Environments

📋 Description

• Establish effective workflows and tools that enable artists to create high-quality, efficient content, collaborating with rendering, machine learning, and perception teams to ensure optimal performance within our audio-visual stack.

• Design and uphold a physically-based material pipeline for our simulation engines (such as MDL, shader graphs, or similar tools).

• Create and fine-tune high-quality shaders and materials that accurately respond under various lighting conditions and camera models.

• Standardize material libraries, authoring practices, and validation workflows to maintain consistency and performance across all content.

• Define best practices for environment and hero lighting in simulation scenes, incorporating elements like sky/atmospherics, time-of-day configurations, and camera-accurate exposure settings.

• Develop in-engine lighting tools and evaluation scenes to assist artists in quickly assessing quality, realism, and performance.

• Collaborate with rendering engineers to analyze lighting and shading performance, implementing optimizations that reduce costs without compromising essential visual elements.

• Create procedural systems to populate expansive environments with structures, vegetation, traffic control devices, road debris, and other set elements.

• Formulate procedural tools and workflows for generating layouts (streets, landscaping, prop distributions) that adhere to design, performance, and simulation requirements.

• Work with worldbuilding and content teams to translate art direction and audio-visual testing needs into manageable procedural parameters.

• Collaborate with Simulation, Machine Learning, and Perception teams to grasp the concept of "realism" from a sensor and model-performance viewpoint, adjusting your work accordingly.

• Document standards, disseminate best practices, and mentor other artists and technical artists on shading, lighting, and procedural workflows.

⛳️ Requirements

• 5+ years of experience (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) as a Technical Artist, Technical Director, or a similar hybrid role in games, VFX, animation, or simulation.

• A robust reel or portfolio showcasing materials/shading, lighting, and procedural environment work, with clear annotations of your personal contributions.

• Profound understanding of physically-based rendering (PBR), BRDFs, texture workflows, and the ability to create materials that perform well under diverse lighting and exposure conditions.

• Practical experience in building or maintaining lighting pipelines within a real-time or near-real-time engine (Unreal, Unity, proprietary systems, etc.), including performance profiling and optimization.

• Familiarity with shader authoring in MDL, HLSL/GLSL, shader graphs, or similar frameworks.

• At least 3 years of experience using Houdini or equivalent procedural tools to create environments, layouts, or set dressing on a large scale.

• Strong foundation in 3D mathematics and the ability to express these concepts in node graphs and code (e.g., for scattering, LOD rules, masking, and terrain-aware placement).

• Proficient in Python for developing pipeline tools, exporters, validators, and DCC integrations; experience with PySide/PyQt or similar UI frameworks is advantageous.

• Experience in integrating DCC tools (Maya, Houdini, Substance, etc.) with game/simulation engines and asset management systems.

• Capability to profile and troubleshoot performance issues related to materials, lighting, and environmental complexity, effectively communicating findings to both artists and engineers.

• Comfortable taking ownership of problems throughout the entire process—from discussions with artists, to designing solutions, to launching tools, and iterating based on feedback.

• Excellent communication skills and a proven ability to bridge the gap between art and engineering, especially in situations where priorities may conflict or trade-offs are necessary.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical

• Dental

• Vision

• Health Savings Account

• Flexible Spending Accounts

• Retirement savings plan

• Sickness and accident benefits

• Life insurance

• Paid vacation & holidays

• Tuition assistance programs

• Employee assistance program

• GM vehicle discounts and more.