Lead Technical Artist (Staff, Principal)

**SUMMARY** Gym Class is the top rated game on the Meta Quest platform (58K ratings, 4.9 stars). Millions of players globally have downloaded GC to make friends, explore social worlds, and compete to become a star. Our community formed around social basketball, and is now rapidly expanding interests and gameplay - including football, baseball, and much more. As a Lead Technical Artist, you’ll play a pivotal role in bridging the gap between art and engineering, ensuring high-quality character animation, motion systems, and real-time graphics for VR and mobile platforms. You'll be responsible for developing tools, optimizing asset pipelines, and implementing cutting-edge solutions to push Gym Class's visual fidelity and performance. The company is backed by top technology and sports investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, National Basketball Association (NBA), the Golden State Warriors, and top player-investors like Kevin Durant, Danny Green, Zaza Pachulia, Andre Iguodala, and Lonzo Ball. Join Gym Class if you'd like to work at the frontier of social gaming, love to ship great work that has a direct impact on a product and company, enjoy fast feedback cycles from a hungry community, and want to build your career with a fast-growing startup. **WHAT YOU'LL DO** * Develop & Optimize Art Pipelines: Build and maintain scalable asset pipelines for avatars, environment assets, and real-time effects, focusing on Unity-based VR and mobile performance. * Tool Development: Design and implement custom tools and automation scripts (Python, C#) to improve animator workflows, asset processing, and motion data integration. * Shader & Rendering Optimization: Develop and optimize shaders and materials for character animation and environments, ensuring real-time performance while maintaining high-quality visuals in VR. * Performance Profiling & Optimization – Ensure assets are optimized for VR and mobile by working with engineers to analyze GPU/CPU impact, reduce draw calls, and streamline animation playback. * Lighting & Art Quality: Apply a strong artistic eye to guide lighting setups, material properties, and rendering techniques, ensuring a high level of visual fidelity in VR. **QUALIFICATIONS** * Unity & C# Expertise: Strong experience in developing and optimizing art pipelines, implementing custom tools, and enhancing real-time rendering workflows within Unity using C#. * Rigging & Animation Pipelines: Deep understanding of rigging, skinning, IK/FK systems, animation compression, blendshape animations, and procedural animation in Maya & Unity. * Scripting & Tool Development: Proficiency in Python, C#, or MEL scripting for automating workflows and improving artist efficiency. * Shader Development & Optimization: Experience with Shader Graph, HLSL, or GLSL to create high-performance shaders tailored for VR & mobile. * Performance Optimization: Strong knowledge of GPU/CPU performance trade-offs, animation LODs, texture streaming, and Unity Profiler usage for VR and mobile development. * Highly Organized & Detail-Oriented: Ability to manage complex pipelines, maintain structured workflows, document processes clearly, and ensure efficient and optimized assets across platforms. **PAY AND BENEFITS** Salary ranges may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Additional benefits for this role include: equity; medical, dental, and vision benefits; and retirement matching.