2K Games - Technical Art Graduate Program - Cary, North Carolina

2K Early Careers; North Carolina; On-site; USD 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

2K Games’ Technical Art Graduate Program in Cary, North Carolina, is a 21-month entry program beginning Summer 2027. You’ll rotate across studios like Hangar 13, HB Studios, Visual Concepts, Firaxis, Small Axe, and Gearbox, delivering across four specializations and building the tools artists use daily.

Foundation training runs on Unreal Engine, Maya, Python, and Perforce. You arrive with one or two of these tools and learn the rest as you progress, with rotations shaped by project timelines and

Qualifications

• Outstanding portfolio showing work across game art, tooling, scripts, or rigs.
• Two essentials: a strong portfolio plus some scripting ability.
• Curiosity, persistence, and communication are highly valued.
• Education in Game Art, Animation, VFX, Technical Art, CS, Engineering, or related field.
• Recent graduates eligible January 2025 to June 2027; exceptions possible.
• Experience with mod work, game jams, university projects, or freelance work is relevant.

Skills

Portfolio

Scripting

Unreal Engine

Education

Game Art or related field

Tools

Maya

Blender

Houdini

Unreal Engine

Substance

Job description

2K Games - Technical Art Graduate Program - Cary, North Carolina

North Carolina, United States

Founded in 2005, 2K Games is a global video game company, publishing titles developed by some of the most influential game development studios in the world. Our studios responsible for developing 2K’s portfolio of world-class games across multiple platforms, include Visual Concepts, Firaxis, Hangar 13, CatDaddy, Cloud Chamber, and HB Studios. Our portfolio of titles is expanding due to our global strategic plan, building, and acquiring exciting studios whose content continues to inspire all of us! 2K publishes titles in today’s most popular gaming genres, including sports, shooters, action, role-playing, strategy, casual, and family entertainment.

Our team of engineers, marketers, artists, writers, data scientists, producers, problem solvers, and doers, are the professional publishing stewards of our growing library of critically acclaimed franchises such as NBA 2K, Battleborn, BioShock, Borderlands, PGA TOUR 2K, Mafia, Sid Meir’s Civilization, WWE 2K, and XCOM.

At 2K, we pride ourselves on creating an inclusive work environment, which means encouraging our teams to Come as You Are and do your best work! We are dedicated to diversity and inclusion and want our community of candidates to reflect this commitment. We encourage all qualified applicants to explore our global positions.

What is Technical Art?

Technical Artists make the art team more capable than it would be on its own. The art team is your customer, its problems set your priorities, and your work is judged on whether the artists it was built for actually use it.

In practice that means building the tools artists use to create content, the rigs that make characters move, the shaders that give a world its look, the rules that scatter a landscape with vegetation, and the pipelines that carry all of it into the game.

Program overview

21 months, starting Summer 2027, based in Cary, North Carolina.

You get a brief, a deadline, and the tools art teams use every day, and you work out how to deliver. You build across all four specializations, including the ones you are weakest in: Pipeline and Tools, Character and Animation, Rendering and Visuals, Environment and World. What you build is reviewed by people who do this for a living, and the review covers how you worked and how you talked to the people you built it for, not only what you delivered. Some of the work is yours alone and some is shared with the Engineering and Publishing graduates.

Foundation Training runs on Unreal Engine, Maya, Python, and Perforce. The program assumes you arrive knowing one or two of them, not all four.

Three strategic rotations, six months each.

Rotations run across our studios, including Hangar 13, HB Studios, Visual Concepts, Firaxis, Small Axe, and Gearbox, and across the central technology teams that build the tools and pipelines every studio shares. Which team you rotate onto is decided around game timelines, and what the teams need at the time, and your own developing focus is part of that conversation.

What we are looking for

An outstanding portfolio is the first thing we look at, and it should show the work and how you got there. It does not have to be an art portfolio. Tools, scripts, rigs, shaders all count. If the work was made with other people, tell us which parts were yours.

There are two things you need:

• Comfort in at least one content-creation package or game engine. Maya, Blender, Houdini, Substance, Unreal Engine, or whatever you happened to learn.
• Some scripting. It does not need to be much, but you should be able to read code and have written something.

Beyond that, the qualities that matter most:

• Curiosity. You want to know how things are made, and you dig in to find out.
• Persistence. A lot of this job is being stuck: something is broken, the reason is not obvious, and you keep going until you find it.
• Communication. You will spend more time talking and asking questions than most people expect.

Education. Game Art, Animation, VFX, Technical Art, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. We also take people with any unrelated degree who have a portfolio that shows the work. What you have made matters more to us than where you studied. The key is that you have a recent degree.

Experience. No games industry experience is needed. This is a graduate program, and it is built for people who have never worked in games. Mod work, game jams, university projects, and freelance work are all relevant experiences as far as we are concerned.

Recent graduates. Eligible Grads from January 2025 to June 2027 are eligible to apply. Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis if your grad date falls outside of these dates.

Technical Art is a job people arrive at from many directions, so apply even if you do not match every line above.