Lead Environment Artist

RESPONSIBILITIES

Lead the creation of high-quality environments from concept through final implementation.
Establish and maintain the visual quality bar for environments while ensuring technical and performance requirements are met.
Create optimized environment assets, including modular kits, architecture, terrain, props, materials, and set dressing.
Work closely with Technical Artists, Level Designers, Lighting Artists, and Engineers to balance visual quality with performance.
Define and maintain environment art pipelines, workflows, and technical standards.
Identify and resolve performance issues related to geometry, materials, textures, lighting, draw calls, memory usage, LODs, and asset complexity.
Review and provide feedback on the work of Environment Artists and support their professional development.
Collaborate with Art Direction to translate the artistic vision into scalable and technically achievable environments.
Participate in profiling and optimization throughout production rather than treating optimization as a final-stage task.

REQUIREMENTS

Strong professional experience as a Senior or Lead Environment Artist in game development.
Excellent portfolio demonstrating visually compelling, production-ready environments.
Strong understanding of real-time optimization and the ability to make informed trade-offs between visual fidelity and performance.
Advanced knowledge of environment production pipelines, modular workflows, LODs, materials, shaders, texture optimization, and asset budgets.
Strong proficiency with industry-standard 3D tools and experience working in Unreal Engine and/or Unity.
Good understanding of lighting, composition, scale, color, and environmental storytelling.
Ability to profile environments, identify technical bottlenecks, and collaborate with technical teams to resolve them.
Leadership and mentoring experience, with the ability to provide clear and constructive artistic and technical feedback.
Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.