We are looking for a Lead Environmental Artist who combines a strong artistic eye with solid technical expertise. This role is not only about creating visually impressive environments — we need someone who understands how to build high-quality, optimized, production-ready environments that perform efficiently in a real-time game engine.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the creation of high-quality environments from concept through final implementation.
- Establish and maintain the visual quality bar for environments while ensuring technical and performance requirements are met.
- Create optimized environment assets, including modular kits, architecture, terrain, props, materials, and set dressing.
- Work closely with Technical Artists, Level Designers, Lighting Artists, and Engineers to balance visual quality with performance.
- Define and maintain environment art pipelines, workflows, and technical standards.
- Identify and resolve performance issues related to geometry, materials, textures, lighting, draw calls, memory usage, LODs, and asset complexity.
- Review and provide feedback on the work of Environment Artists and support their professional development.
- Collaborate with Art Direction to translate the artistic vision into scalable and technically achievable environments.
- Participate in profiling and optimization throughout production rather than treating optimization as a final-stage task.
REQUIREMENTS
- Strong professional experience as a Senior or Lead Environment Artist in game development.
- Excellent portfolio demonstrating visually compelling, production-ready environments.
- Strong understanding of real-time optimization and the ability to make informed trade-offs between visual fidelity and performance.
- Advanced knowledge of environment production pipelines, modular workflows, LODs, materials, shaders, texture optimization, and asset budgets.
- Strong proficiency with industry-standard 3D tools and experience working in Unreal Engine and/or Unity.
- Good understanding of lighting, composition, scale, color, and environmental storytelling.
- Ability to profile environments, identify technical bottlenecks, and collaborate with technical teams to resolve them.
- Leadership and mentoring experience, with the ability to provide clear and constructive artistic and technical feedback.
- Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.