Technical Art Expert

About the Hiring Team

Tencent Games’ Venture Lab supports Tencent’s third-party (minority stake) studios, working on a diverse range of titles across various genres. Our mission is to elevate these studios' potential from early development to independence by providing comprehensive advisory services across production, publishing, technology, and more.

What the Role Entails

Job Overview

Tencent Games’ Venture Lab is looking for a highly skilled expert to join our team as a Technical Art Director/Expert. You will work closely with studio developers, focusing on providing technical-art-related advisory and support. This position emphasises a collaborative, advisory role, may require frequent travel, and is responsible for ensuring that our studio partners have the resources and guidance needed to succeed in an ever-evolving and competitive gaming market.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with our minority stake portfolio companies to build an understanding of their artistic direction, technical art related issues and challenges, both remotely and in person as appropriate.
• Partner with essential portfolio studio team members in a collaborative and constructive way to respectfully guide them towards establishing, elevating, and maintaining artistic quality. For example when there is a need to:

  a) Introduce best practices and set standards for art pipelines, optimisation, and performance.

  b) Define organisational structures and processes for effective and reliable delivery of art assets, including under games-as-a-service and outsourced production models.

  c) Identify the need for, create, refine, and optimise shaders, tools, and pipelines.

  d) Create procedural workflows and toolsets, including in-engine tools that improve content creation and asset integration.

• Advise and assist studios in the creation of productised tools, such as UGC tools and workflows.
• Develop and maintain a comprehensive knowledge of graphics and art technologies, tools, services and resources that are available within Tencent and its partners, and use your insights to leverage these to create opportunities for portfolio studios.
• Use your visibility of common technical art challenges, best practices and solutions derived from engagements with portfolio studios and other case studies in order to synthesise guidance materials, presentations and advice for the benefit of our investees.
• Remain at the forefront of art and graphics development techniques and processes in the games industry.

Who We Look For

• Empathy, strong communication skills, and the ability to partner and advise effectively.
• 10+ years experience as a Technical Art Director or equivalent role, and experience leading technical art throughout the entire development lifecycle within medium/large development teams on successful titles in the video game industry.
• Leadership experience in setting strategic direction. Outstanding organisational skills and ability.
• An inquisitive mind and understanding of the latest graphics technology and research trends, with the ability to articulate and advise on their practical application in portfolio game projects.
• Experience establishing working practices with outsource or other external art production resources — within one location and globally.
• Solid technical art ability, such as:

a) Confident scripting abilities in Python or other languages.

b) Good knowledge of 1 or more DCC packages such as Maya/Max/Blender/Houdini.

c) Fundamental knowledge of rendering pipelines, HLSL/GLSL, cutting-edge visual effects (VFX), advanced lighting and procedural workflows and toolsets.

d) In-depth knowledge of performance optimization strategies, asset streaming, and LOD systems across multiple platforms.

• Strong development experience in Unreal Engine. Experience in Unity and other engines is also desirable.

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Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.