Lead Technical Artist

Developing, designing and maintaining art pipelines, solving complex content creation problems and keeping art teams at optimal productivity. 
Own the work delivered by your team and are responsible to ensure the scope of work fits the team capacity and delivery times are achievable.
Plan pipeline requirements to support all TW franchise titles with a unified set of tools and workflows.

On a day-to-day basis, this role will:

• Support the wellbeing of your team as a priority
• Foster the career development of your team in skills and behaviours for all levels of technical artist under your management.
• Build a comprehensive understanding of in-house tools, technical art codebase, engine and workflows.
• Strategically plan and deliver professional quality tools and scripts for art packages and game engine.
• Lead by example in collaborating with key pipeline stakeholders in all departments of the Total War team.
• Communicate clearly the status of work from the tech art team to stakeholders consistently.
• Motivate the team to be productive and prioritise work accordingly.
• Follow up task work blocking team progress to ensure consistent delivery of commitments.
• Attend the pipeline standups and tech art team meetings
• Own and organise documentation of the teams' progress to onboard artists and contractors to tools and pipelines your team manages.
• Set coding and quality standards of work and encourage the same in others.
• Support artists in pipeline issues and rapid prototyping and keep art teams productive.
• Work with Technical Art director and project directors to keep aligned on franchise priorities for your area.
• You will be involved in the quarterly planning process, and you will have the opportunity to solve development productivity problems and make a real difference for content creators.

• Has experience writing code in any language. (python/C#/C++)
• Extensive experience of shader creation HLSL and/or node-based.
• Experience in designing pipelines for games that have been released.
• Working knowledge of 3d content creation package(s) e.g. 3dsmax, Maya, Blender.
• Excellent problem-solving skills.
• Team focused with strong communication skills.
• Be the technical expertise point of contact to streamline communication between programmers and artists.
• Positive attitude and desire to collaborate.
• Experience as a Lead technical artist in at least 1 game development cycle to title release
• Profiling tools experience such as render doc/ PIX
• Experience in multi-platform shader development
• Investigate and champion new techniques that push visual innovation within considerations of art direction and game engine parameters.

• Procedural content creation / Houdini knowledge.
• Working knowledge of Substance Designer/Painter.
• Having completed game jams, tools and/or personal projects.
• Art background or training.