Technical Artist (f/m/d)

As a Technical Artist, you are responsible for getting art into the engine at the intended quality and within the performance budget. Tech Art sits between Art and Tech, and covers a deliberately wide surface: materials and shaders, animation systems, UI, VFX, audio integration, procedural content, and the tooling that keeps it  aintainable. The department is small, so your focus changes over the course of a project.

You will work in Unreal Engine 5 on AA titles for PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, in project teams of up to around 70 people. You are responsible for features and deliverables across a milestone or project phase, on your own or with others, in daily exchange with artists, animators, designers and programmers.

Your setups determine the runtime cost of the visual target. The tools you build determine how fast everyone else can iterate. A material that hits the look but costs 4 ms on Switch is not finished.

Our Technical Artists come from different backgrounds: artists who learned to script, programmers with an eye for visuals, technical designers and animators. You do not need to cover every point below, as long as you are willing to learn the rest.

• Build and maintain materials, shaders and material libraries in UE5 — complex graphs, material functions and instances, simple HLSL custom nodes — and own how they perform, not just how they look.
• Author real-time VFX in Niagara: particles, environment effects, ability and player feedback.
• Implement user interfaces with UMG, and Slate where UMG runs out.
• Build and maintain procedural generation pipelines (PCG, Houdini Engine).
• Set up animation systems and the tools around them — Control Rig, Animation Blueprints — and support rigging, skinning and animation topics for the people who live in them every day.
• Integrate audio with MetaSounds and Sound Cues.
• Develop editor tooling that automates work instead of documenting it: Editor Utility Widgets and Actions, Python, editor-exposed functions, commandlets. Blueprint, Unreal C++ and AngelScript are all fair game.
• Set up and maintain the art pipelines between the DCC tools (Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini) and Unreal, including import/export rules and validation that catches mistakes before they reach the build.
• Profile and optimise content with Unreal Insights, RenderDoc and the platform profilers — on PC and on console — find the actual bottleneck, and fix it without giving up the visual target.
• Support the art team on the technical side of their assets: mesh topology, UV channels, vertex colours and weights, material slots, LOD setups.
• Build data-driven setups (Data Tables, CSV/JSON, Data Assets) so designers and artists can iterate on values without waiting for an engineer.
• Break down the problems you're given, estimate your own work and align expectations before you start; peer-review other Tech Artists' deliverables and document your own approach so the next person can follow it.

Must-haves

• 3+ years of hands-on production experience in game development, ideally on a shipped title. UE4/UE5 preferred if you're coming from another engine, tell us what transfers.
• Solid, hands-on UE5 knowledge: project structure, asset organisation, the editor and its main toolsets, and how the engine's feature sets connect to each other.
• Confidence in the Material Editor: complex material graphs, PBR workflows, material instances and functions, texture packing and UV channel management — plus reading and writing simple HLSL.
• You know where the cost of your setups comes from and how to measure it: draw calls, passes, LODs, and why the material you're proud of just cost 4 ms.
• Solid 3D and math fundamentals — vector and matrix math, transforms, coordinate spaces, geometry, trigonometry and a good understanding of how mesh data is authored, exported and consumed by the engine.
• You script. Blueprint fluency plus a working foundation in Python or C++, basic coding hygiene included — and the reflex behind it: if a task is going to recur, you automate it.
• A real artistic eye colour, composition, aesthetic consistency, game feel and the discipline to serve someone else's art direction rather than your own.
• Awareness of rigging, skinning and animation fundamentals, and of VFX principles in Niagara.
• Perforce, or a comparable version control system built for large binary assets, in a team setting.
• You build things other people can use: clean by default, documented, and explained in workflows an artist can follow — because what you build gets reused across projects and by people who won't ask you first. You raise problems early rather than letting them surface late.
• You want to make games, not just work in games. We will ask what you last built, broke or took apart — a side project, a shader experiment, a mod, a tool that saved you an hour. Size doesn't matter; the pull does.
• You learn continuously because you enjoy it. UE5 moves every few months, and the people who do well here find that interesting rather than exhausting.
• Confident English, spoken and written it's our company and project language.
• Munich. That's where the team is and where we'd like you to be. We've made the occasional exception for someone exceptional if you think that's you, make the case.

Earlier in your career than that? Apply anyway if the work speaks for itself. We hire strong juniors when we meet them, and we would rather see your portfolio than your CV.

Nice-to-haves

Nobody has all of these. They're here so you can see what we actually work with and if you arrive with a specialisation, we'd rather find out what it is and use it than hire around it.

• A first specialisation in one of our high-demand areas: in-engine animation workflows (Control Rig, Animation Blueprints, Motion Matching), UI implementation (UMG), performance optimisation, or procedural generation (PCG, Houdini Engine).
• AngelScript. We run a custom engine branch with AngelScript alongside C++ and Blueprint you don't need it on day one, but a lot of our gameplay and tooling is written in it.
• C++ beyond reading it — exposing functionality to Blueprint, for example.
• Unreal's audio framework in depth: MetaSounds, Sound Cues, attenuation, soundscape.
• Substance Designer, SpeedTree, Houdini, World Machine or comparable procedural content tools.
• In-depth lighting and post-processing work.
• Shipped or supported console projects (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch) and lived with their platform constraints.
• Agile practice — ours is adapted to how the studio actually works rather than textbook Scrum.

What changes at Senior level

• You own a domain, not a task list. People come to you with "the vegetation is eating our frame time", not with a ticket.
• You set technical standards for the department, and you make the other Tech Artists better through review and mentoring.
• You get pulled in while features are still being scoped, and your "that's going to cost us" carries weight in the decision.
• You decide what we build ourselves and what we buy or take from the engine — and you argue the case.

• An inspiring and creative work environment
• A 38-hour workweek to ensure a healthy work-life balance.
• Relocation support to ensure a smooth start in Munich.
• Flexibility through remote work options tailored to project requirements.
• Free drinks (soft drinks, coffee, tea) and weekly fresh organic fruits.
• Monthly top-up of a company card worth €50, usable for various purchases*.
• Table tennis and foosball tables for relaxation after demanding tasks.
• Exciting company events that foster knowledge exchange and provide space for fun and recreation.
• Coverage of public transportation costs and meal subsidies*.

*After successful completion of the probation period.