Lighting Artist - GameSim - Talent Pipeline
RemoteOntario, California, United States
Ontario, California, United StatesRemoteFull TimeEnterprise
Full TimeEnterprise
Job Summary
Create high-quality real-time lighting for gameplay environments, levels, cinematics, and interactive sequences, translating art direction and client feedback into solutions that establish mood, visual hierarchy, and environmental storytelling. Take ownership of assigned scenes from initial setup through final polish while maintaining visual consistency across related environments and lighting conditions. Provide constructive feedback to other artists, review multidisciplinary work, and ensure scenes meet established quality and technical standards. Balance hands-on production with coordination, troubleshooting, and team support to deliver work on schedule.
Required Qualifications
- Professional experience creating lighting for games, real-time projects, animation, visualization, or a closely related field
- A portfolio or reel demonstrating strong real-time lighting work
- Strong understanding of lighting fundamentals, including value, color, contrast, composition, visual hierarchy, atmosphere, exposure, shadow, and material response
- Experience lighting gameplay environments or interactive real-time scenes
- Understanding of how lighting supports mood, gameplay readability, navigation, environmental storytelling, and player focus
- Professional experience using Unreal Engine or another modern real-time engine
- Experience with dynamic or baked lighting, global illumination, reflections, volumetrics, exposure, color grading, and post-processing
- Working knowledge of physically based rendering and material response
- Understanding of basic lighting optimization, including light cost, shadows, volumetrics, reflections, scalability, and platform constraints
- Ability to take ownership of assigned scenes and follow them through review and completion
- Ability to receive, interpret, and implement artistic and technical feedback
- Experience reviewing artwork or providing constructive feedback to teammates
- Ability to identify work that does not meet an established quality target and communicate practical improvements
- Ability to balance visual quality, technical requirements, production scope, and schedule
- Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills
- Ability to organize priorities, communicate risks, and follow work through to completion
- Experience collaborating with multiple game-development disciplines
- Ability to adapt to different projects, visual styles, engines, pipelines, and client expectations
- Ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a distributed team
- Experience with a professional real-time lighting toolset
- Unreal Engine 5 or another modern real-time engine
- Lumen or comparable real-time global-illumination systems
- GPU Lightmass, CPU Lightmass, or comparable baked-lighting systems
- Real-time profiling, visualization, and debugging tools
- Photoshop or comparable image-editing software
- DaVinci Resolve, Nuke, After Effects, or comparable color and compositing tools
- Maya, Blender, 3ds Max, or another 3D content-creation package
- Perforce or another production source-control system
- Jira, Confluence, Miro, or comparable planning and documentation tools
Desired Qualifications
- Experience working in co-development, outsourcing, consulting, or work-for-hire game production
- Experience contributing to a shipped PC or console title
- Experience working across realistic and stylized visual pipelines
- Previous experience acting as a lighting point person, task coordinator, reviewer, or feature owner
- Experience guiding junior artists or supporting teammates without formal management authority
- Experience working with remote teams, partner studios, or external vendors
- Experience owning lighting for a level, environment, sequence, or gameplay feature
- Knowledge of Unreal Engine systems such as Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, volumetric fog, reflection systems, exposure controls, post-process volumes, and scalability settings
- Experience with dynamic time-of-day systems, weather systems, destructible environments, or changing gameplay states
- Experience lighting cinematics, characters, dialogue scenes, or scripted sequences
- Knowledge of cinematography, photography, film lighting, camera exposure, and color theory
- Familiarity with HDR displays, tone mapping, calibration, or accessibility considerations
- Familiarity with rendering pipelines, shader behavior, and material development
- Familiarity with Blueprints, Python, editor scripting, automation, or technical-art workflows
- Experience creating lighting documentation
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