Lead Technical Artist / Artiste technique principal(e)
HybridMontréal, Quebec, Canada
Job Summary
Define and drive technical art vision, standards, and workflows across characters, animation, gameplay, VFX, environments, UI, and audio for PC, console, and mobile platforms. Lead the Technical Art organization, managing hiring, performance, and career development while building systems, pipelines, and teams that enable efficient content creation. Own the Unreal Engine 5 strategy, partnering with Engineering to develop engine extensions, rendering features, automation, and build pipelines. Establish content ingestion standards, CI/CD integration, and creator-facing tooling using Python and DCC scripting. Define performance budgets, profiling methodologies, and optimization standards, particularly for mobile scalability, memory, and thermals. Provide technical leadership for rigging, shaders, materials, and animation technologies, reviewing work to ensure quality and maintainability. Collaborate with Art, Design, and Production to align constraints and execute the long-term technical roadmap. Serve as the escalation point for complex technical challenges and maintain robust documentation to support team scaling.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional experience in Technical Art
- at least 2+ years leading teams and driving technical direction across multiple disciplines
- Experience shipping one or more games as a Technical Artist
- Deep expertise in Unreal Engine 5
- Blueprints
- Animation Blueprints
- Control Rig
- Niagara
- Material Editor
- Unreal tooling frameworks
- content pipelines
- Strong understanding of the full technical art stack
- character pipelines
- rigging
- skinning
- animation systems
- VFX integration
- shaders
- materials
- rendering
- UI
- optimization
- content workflows
- Experience building production tooling
- automation systems
- asset validation frameworks
- content pipelines
- Strong scripting skills using Python
- integrating DCC workflows
- Unreal Engine tooling
- MEL
- MaxScript
- similar scripting languages
- Strong understanding of profiling
- optimization
- performance analysis
- PC
- console
- mobile platforms
- Experience working closely with engineers
- engine-level features
- platform optimization
- content systems
- tooling architecture
- Excellent communication skills
- ability to translate between art, design, production, and engineering teams
- Demonstrated leadership experience
- building strong teams
- clear standards
- mentorship
- feedback
- trust
Desired Qualifications
- Experience leading Technical Art across multiple disciplines
- gameplay
- characters
- animation
- VFX
- UI
- environments
- mobile
- pipeline development
- Experience building and scaling technical art organizations
- AAA or large-scale game productions
- Deep familiarity with DCC ecosystems
- integration into Unreal Engine production pipelines
- Experience with Unreal Engine systems
- Niagara
- Control Rig
- Animation Blueprints
- Gameplay Ability System
- Material Editor
- Blueprint-driven workflows
- Experience designing creator-facing tools
- automation systems
- validation frameworks
- scalable content pipelines
- Experience with HLSL
- shader development
- material optimization
- rendering performance analysis
- graphics debugging workflows
- Strong understanding of mobile rendering constraints
- mobile GPU architectures
- memory budgets
- thermal limitations
- sustained performance considerations
- Experience supporting live-service
- UGC
- creator-focused
- platform-oriented products
- Proven ability to improve team efficiency
- tooling
- automation
- documentation
- workflow design
- Strong understanding of game feel
- player feedback system
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