Senior / Staff Technical Artist – Materials, Lighting, Procedural Environments

Role Overview

• Define practical workflows and tools that let artists author high‑quality, performant content, and you’ll partner with rendering, ML, and perception teams to make sure it behaves as expected in our AV stack.
• Design and maintain a physically‑based material pipeline for our simulation engines (e.g., MDL, shader graphs, or equivalent).
• Author and calibrate high‑quality shaders and materials that respond correctly under a wide range of lighting conditions and camera models.
• Standardize material libraries, authoring conventions, and validation workflows to keep content consistent and performant.
• Define best practices for environment and hero lighting in simulation scenes, including sky/atmospherics, time‑of‑day setups, and camera‑accurate exposure.
• Build in‑engine lighting tools and evaluation scenes to help artists quickly assess quality, realism, and performance.
• Partner with rendering engineers to profile lighting and shading, and to ship optimizations that reduce cost without sacrificing critical visual cues.
• Build procedural systems to populate large‑scale environments with buildings, vegetation, traffic control devices, road debris, and other set dressing.
• Develop procedural tools and workflows for generating layouts (streets, landscaping, prop distributions) that respect design, performance, and simulation constraints.
• Collaborate with worldbuilding and content teams to encode art direction and AV testing needs into controllable procedural parameters.
• Partner with Simulation, ML, and Perception teams to understand what “realism” means from a sensor and model‑performance perspective, and tune your work accordingly.
• Document standards, share best practices, and mentor other artists and technical artists on shading, lighting, and procedural workflows.

Requirements

• 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) experience as a Technical Artist, Technical Director, or similar hybrid role in games, VFX, animation, or simulation.
• A strong reel or portfolio demonstrating materials/shading, lighting, and procedural environment work, with clear notes on your personal contribution.
• Deep understanding of physically-based rendering (PBR), BRDFs, texture workflows, and how to author materials that hold up under varied lighting and exposure.
• Production experience building or maintaining lighting pipelines in a real-time or near-real-time engine (Unreal, Unity, proprietary, etc.), including performance profiling and optimization.
• Familiarity with authoring shaders in MDL, HLSL/GLSL, shader graphs, or similar systems.
• 3+ years working with Houdini or equivalent procedural tools to generate environments, layouts, or set dressing at scale.
• Solid 3D math fundamentals and comfort expressing them in node graphs and code (e.g., for scattering, LOD rules, masking, and terrain-aware placement).
• Strong Python skills for building pipeline tools, exporters, validators, and DCC integrations; experience with PySide/PyQt or similar UI frameworks is a plus.
• Experience integrating DCC tools (Maya, Houdini, Substance, etc.) with game/simulation engines and asset management systems.
• Ability to profile and debug performance issues related to materials, lighting, and environment complexity, and to communicate findings clearly to both artists and engineers.
• Comfortable owning problems end-to-end—from talking to artists, to sketching designs, to shipping tools, to iterating based on feedback.
• Strong communication skills and a track record of bridging art and engineering, especially when priorities conflict or trade-offs are required.

Tech Stack

• Node.js
• Python
• Unity
• Unreal Engine

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision
• Health Savings Account
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• retirement savings plan
• sickness and accident benefits
• life insurance
• paid vacation & holidays
• tuition assistance programs
• employee assistance program
• GM vehicle discounts and more.