Lead Technical Artist - Unannounced | Irvine, CA
Blizzard Entertainment - Irvine, CA
posted 1 day ago
About the position
At Blizzard, we craft genre-defining games and legendary worlds for all to share. Through unparalleled creativity and storytelling, we create immersive universes and iconic characters that are beloved across platforms, borders, backgrounds, and generations - only made possible by building a work environment that nurtures the artistry of game development and unleashes the aspirations of our people. We are looking for a Lead Technical Artist to help us define and craft Blizzard's next great game. As a key member of the development team, you will be responsible for overseeing the delivery of high-quality Tech Art work including art pipelines, proprietary tools, software plug-ins, and in game technology. You understand how to effectively build, integrate, and optimize a variety of technical game content and pipelines that support gameplay and enable the Art team to hit iconic visual standards. You are comfortable operating in a startup environment, navigating through ambiguity with purpose. This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The home studio for this role is Irvine, CA.
Responsibilities
- Mentor and guide technical artists in areas of expertise and help instill best practices.
- Cultivate other members of the team through direct management of skills, processes, and technical / artistic techniques.
- Engage in broader game production challenges as they relate to design, art and engineering.
- Collaborate with design, art and engineering on efficient workflows and automation.
- Partner with other leads and directors to meet visual and technical standards.
- Own performance optimization for art assets by creating clear art performance standards, asset performance monitoring tools, and by building a maintainable process for reviewing and addressing asset performance optimization.
- Research, define, extend, and maintain production pipelines, processes, and workflows.
- Collaborate with art, engineering, and design to ensure that technical art vision is serving the project's needs.
- Identify problems and solve them by implementing off the shelf solutions or in the case where a solution does not exist, by creating robust technical implementations.
- Make and help implement recommendations on how to improve both product quality and group productivity.
- Identify potential and recurring workflow problems and collaborate with other developers to find viable solutions.
- Manage and maintain asset integration, files, pipelines and processes.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in AAA Tech Art.
- Proven experience, having shipped multiple major titles in a relevant role.
- Experience in a Leadership position managing a team of Technical Artists.
- Comprehensive understanding of all major aspects of content creation in commercial engines.
- Strong understanding of PBR.
- Expertise in Python, C#, and/or C++ - specifically as it applies to programming in DCC applications (such as Maya).
Nice-to-haves
- Experience working through early development R&D phases of a project is a plus.
- Experience handling high-poly workflow data.
- Passion for playing a variety of video games.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
- 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
- Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
- Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
- Relocation assistance if required to move geographic locations for the job.
