Lighting Artist / Technical Director (Unreal/Unity)

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Salary: $103,812 – $132,930 per year

Company

A world-leading effects facility serving the motion picture and attraction industries, specializing in groundbreaking visual effects, VR, AR, and immersive cinema.

What you will do

• Design lighting setups for environments, characters, and interactive assets based on Art Direction and concept artwork.
• Implement lightmap baking, dynamic lighting tools, image-based specular lighting, and post-process volumes.
• Collaborate with environment, character, and VFX artists to align aesthetics with performance via shaders and geometry.
• Partner with level designers to animate dynamic lighting transitions using level blueprints or sequencers.
• Contribute to workflow improvements, optimizations, and the triage and fixing of technical bugs.
• Polish final project assets to ensure high visual quality and performance optimization.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Lighting TD/Artist in AAA game development or animation/VFX/film.
• Deep technical knowledge of real-time lighting toolsets, including HDR IBL workflows and color grading.
• Proficiency in Unreal Engine or Unity, encompassing both dynamic and baked lighting workflows.
• In-depth knowledge of PBR pipelines, real-time shader implementations, and VR shader limitations.
• Experience with Windows, JIRA, and Perforce for workload and data management.
• Portfolio or reel submission including a detailed breakdown of work is required.

Nice to have

• Background in traditional art, photography, or film studies.
• Proficiency with profiling tools to diagnose lighting-related performance issues.
• Experience with Maya, Substance Designer/Painter, Zbrush, Mudbox, Houdini, Mari, 3ds Max, Photoshop, or Nuke.
• Ability and interest in working with proprietary toolsets.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to contribute to award-winning immersive projects like Vader Immortal and CARNE y ARENA.
• Environment dedicated to pushing the boundaries of storytelling and immersive entertainment.
• Comprehensive medical, financial, and corporate benefits package.
• Collaboration within a legendary studio known for technical and creative innovation.