Lead Technical Artist - Unannounced Game

Are you an experienced Technical Art leader who wants to lead a team of talented tech artists on a brand-new game with a hugely popular IP?

As the Lead Technical Artist on this unannounced project being developed in UE5, you will be responsible for ensuring that the artistic and creative vision for this exciting new game are not compromised by the technical limitations of software, engine, processes or pipelines and can push the boundaries of what’s possible in order to reach and go beyond visual targets for the game.

This is a role for an experienced tech art lead who still wants the opportunity to be hands-on as a tech artist as well. As you will be liaising with your own team, production, programming and art this is a hugely impactful role where you will be a driving force to make the team’s vision a reality.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead & foster the development of a team of technical artists of different levels of experience.
• Drive quality standards and ensure all content is meeting technical specifications while hitting the art direction criteria.
• Lead others on best practice, including defining and documenting game or engine technical specifications and driving workflow optimizations.
• Strategically plan and deliver professional quality tools and scripts for art packages (Python, MEL, Z-script) or tools that extend to the game engine.
• Author and maintain scripts, tools, or documentation for external asset production.
• Ensure all tools have streamlined UX with re-usable modular components, highly adaptable controls together with clear documentation.
• Build, document, and maintain a robust framework on which to build the game’s foundation (folder structures, naming conventions, etc)
• Support the teams rapid prototyping and problem solving from a technical perspective.
• Lead the definition of specifications and strategic planning for a games graphical technology, tooling, and performance.
• Be the ‘go to’ technical expertise point of contact between code and art, feeding back to the game engineers on system needs and improvements.
• Effectively debug and correct very complex, interconnected problems with cross discipline dependencies.
• Investigate and champion new techniques that push visual innovation whilst adhering to art direction and game engine parameters.

What we’re looking for:

• Proven experience as a lead technical artist on games developed in Unreal Engine or similar game engines.
• A keen eye for visual focus, quality and an understanding of how to follow and uphold key art direction and vision.
• Teaching and mentoring proficiency in scripting languages such as Mel, PyMel, PyQT, Python, C# and LUA.
• Experience with or exposure to high level shader languages such as glsl, hlsl and cgfx with the ability to optimize surfacing.
• Demonstrable experience with performance tracking in games.
• Expert understanding and significant experience of different platform requirements.
• Excellent knowledge in modern content creation applications (Maya, Substance, Z-brush, Houdini, Photoshop, etc).
• Deep experience of end-to-end modern development pipelines in 3D asset creation, VFX and animation.
• Ability to script and plan code for efficient re-use and extensibility adhering to coding standards.
• Proven experience of optimization techniques and robust memory budget management.
• Ideally, your portfolio should showcase an artistic background that supports strong visual decision making, as well as tools, scripts and documentation.

Collaboration is at the heart of Jagex. We love getting together with our teams to share ideas and socialise.

If you live in the UK, we offer a flexible working model that empowers you to work in the way that suits you best, while also getting the best from your working relationship with all the great people you’ll be connecting with here. We support you to be set up for success no matter where you log in.

Flexibility really is the key to how we set up working schedules, we’ll discuss your needs with you and be transparent about the working schedules of the team you’ll be working with during our interview process.

About Jagex:

Make forever games with us.

Jagex is a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. We have such huge expertise at running games for the long term that we re-define expectations for what evergreen success looks like.

We create spaces for our players to come together – with each other and with us – inside and outside of our games. We empower our players with real influence on the game’s evolution. We help our players belong. Our community experiences give players a greater stake in what they’re playing, creating loyal forever fans.

These strengths inform our vision of our studio as a thriving international games company with a growing library of forever game IPs for core gamers. Our forever games will nurture sizable communities whose loyalty provides consistent revenues.

This in turn drives our mission: We create forever fans by empowering our community. We give players experiences worthy of their long-term time investment and actively collaborate with them to shape the games and the community for the better.

If this is something you want to be a part of, get in touch.

We have 500 of the industry’s most talented individuals in our Cambridge studio; if you share our values and ambition, we’d love to talk to you. Worried you don’t meet all the requirements in the spec? Your attitude, fresh perspective and experience is just as important to us; if you think this could be the perfect job for you, let’s talk.