About Us:

PlayQ is a rapidly growing mobile gaming studio based in the heart of sunny Santa Monica. Our titles have been downloaded over 60 million times worldwide, with millions of users playing our games every day!

Our goal is to deliver tomorrow's nostalgic game experiences to a global audience and we rely on our dedicated team to craft these unforgettable games that our users love. We believe that the best games come from diverse teams with a shared desire to create something amazing. From our beachfront headquarters to our innovative tech stack, it’s no surprise that PlayQ was named as one of the 2016 Best Places to Work in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal.

We're looking for people who have a genuine love for their craft and we invite you to join us in this exciting endeavor.

Job Overview:

The Technical Artist will work closely with both Art and Engineering to deliver beautiful visual experiences that are also optimized for performance. The ideal person is detail-oriented with a keen eye for visual quality and a passion for researching new techniques. The Technical Artist will develop and drive art pipelines and workflows in close collaboration with the Art Director and Director of Engineering. Additionally, the Technical Artist will be responsible for delivering new and clever solutions that elevate the visual quality of mobile games.

Responsibilities:

• Establish and promote best practices for game art creation, integration, and optimization
• Act as an interface between Art and Engineering.
• Build custom tools, scripts, and shaders to support art creation efforts.
• Ensure art looks beautiful but also renders efficiently across various devices.
• Create and maintain well-defined technical art and 3D art pipelines across various projects.
• Research or create new methods of pushing visual quality within technical constraints.
• Integrate 3D and 2D assets into Unity while communicating optimization techniques the rest of the art team.
• Document pipeline and tools development processes

Requirements:

• 3-5+ years in a Technical Artist or equivalent role
• BS/BA degree or equivalent
• Strong working knowledge of major content creation tools such as 3ds Max, Maya, Substance
• Comfortable writing scripts and tools for the art pipeline in chosen language
• Strong experience with Unity, including familiarity with popular plugins and tools, asset bundles, profiling and memory management
• Strong profiling and optimization skills, with an emphasis on mobile constraints, budgets, draw call reduction, texture compression, and the ability to communicate problems and suggestions to non-technical artists
• Experience with creating and optimizing scenes, lighting, particle effects, shaders, 3D animations and various visual effects.
• Experience setting up and optimizing production art pipelines and workflows, including source control, integrating branches, validating new content additions, and finding and busting workflow bottlenecks
• Excellent organizational and communication skills.
• A portfolio demonstrating high-quality work

Bonus Points:

• 2+ years experience in at least one 3D specialty (modeling, animating, vfx, etc)
• Experience using C# in Unity to write tools to aid content creation and testing for Unity and to improve inefficiencies in the art pipeline (such as automating asset importing, asset building, budget checks, texture atlasing, enforcing content naming and locations)
• Experience with math and implementation of advanced rendering techniques, such as PBR and tools such as Substance Painter

Location & Salary:

• We are offering relocation for this position
• Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience

Perks:

• Competitive compensation and equity options
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision insurance
• Flexible time off
• 401K plan with company match
• Stocked kitchen with free snacks and beverages of your choice
• Catered weekly team lunches
• Brand new penthouse office space equipped with outdoor patios offering beachfront views
• Monthly team outings and volunteer opportunities
• Help build and support awesome GAMES. For a living! Who doesn't love games?

Interested? Please get in touch!