Technical Artist (Virtual Art Department)

Magnopus; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 159,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid time off

Mentorship program

Professional development

Job summary

Magnopus is seeking a Technical Artist to support the Virtual Art Department on high-fidelity, photo-real Virtual Production workflows in Unreal Engine. You will work with artists and engineers to optimize iteration, runtime performance, and asset integration in real time.

You will drive tooling, documentation, and best practices, collaborating across teams to push quality while meeting schedule constraints and ensuring scalability for demanding immersive projects.

Qualifications

• Expertise in industry-standard DCC tools to create assets for real-time environments.
• Proficiency in Unreal Engine with lighting, rendering, and content integration for Virtual Production pipelines.
• Strong understanding of realtime performance constraints and bottleneck resolution.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical expertise and solutions to artists, animators, and riggers.
• Collaborate across departments to improve quality and iteration efficiency.
• Research and suggest tools and processes for projects.
• Extract clear requirements from briefs and set performance objectives.
• Set testing methods and ensure high frame rates on target devices.
• Maintain technical documentation and participate in scrum planning.
• Conduct performance reviews and ensure builds meet quality standards.

Skills

Unreal engine experience

Shader programming

Team collaboration

Problem solving

Communication with non-technical

Mentorship willingness

Tools

Unreal Engine

Maya

3ds Max

Blender

Substance

Photoshop

HLSL/GLSL

Perforce

Git

Job description

Support the Virtual Art Department team on an exciting new project to deliver high-fidelity, photo-real Virtual Production projects in Unreal Engine, ensuring solid workflows that optimize iteration and smooth runtime performance.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical expertise, advice, and solutions to artists, animators, and riggers as required.
• Collaborate across departments and with management to devise comprehensive solutions for quality enhancement and iteration efficiency.
• Research and suggest appropriate tools and processes for projects.
• Independently extract well-defined requirements from creative and artistic briefs.
• Set performance and memory objectives and establish testing methods.
• Understand quality / performance trade-offs and develop solutions that maximize both.
• Manage multiple concurrent tasks from planning to development and delivery.
• Adhere to and contribute to technical art best practices, processes, pipelines and tools.
• Conduct code and content performance reviews as needed.
• Thoroughly test all work in builds before submission.
• Identify potential risks associated with changes prior to submission to source control.
• Understand roles in a scrum environment and assist in the definition of technical art tasks.
• Attend daily standups, break down assigned tasks and provide estimates during sprint planning or other planning exercises
• Proactively identify potential project challenges and propose feasible solutions.
• Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation as needed.

Required Qualifications

• Expertise in industry-standard DCC tools (Maya, Max, Blender, Substance, Photoshop) to create 2D and 3D assets specifically for high-end realtime environments.
• Proficiency in Unreal Engine, including Blueprinting and deep experience with lighting, rendering, and content integration for Virtual Production pipelines.
• Strong understanding of realtime performance constraints, with the ability to identify and resolve bottlenecks within Unreal to maintain high frame rates on target devices.
• Past experience working on photo-real PC projects and Virtual Production workflows, including color-managed pipelines (ACES/OCIO) and HDR rendering.
• Strong proficiency in shader development (HLSL/GLSL) to optimize visual quality while adhering to strict realtime performance objectives.
• Proactive in preempting and addressing performance limitations on target devices.
• Proficient in using performance tools within the engine and on devices to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Proficient working with version control for all work (Perforce, git or other), including work in progress.
• Experience writing and editing clear technical documentation.
• Strong proficiency in creating and optimising through the development of shaders, with a deep understanding of HLSL or GLSL.
• Capable of planning, designing and implementing solutions to a broad range of technical art problems.
• Able to communicate technical issues to non-technical team members.
• A passion and willingness to explore new skills and techniques for themselves and any assigned mentees.

$3,500 - $6,150 biweekly

Compensation is paid on a bi-weekly basis.

Magnopus is an experience focused technology company founded by a team of Oscar-winning artists, designers, and engineers from games, films, and other unusual places. We’re passionate about creating rich experiences that unite the physical and digital worlds.

Because we’re building the future, we endeavor to create a diverse, creative workplace where people from many perspectives collaborate across disciplines to create amazing things together. We invest in our employee’s progression with ongoing education and mentorship opportunities through their guilds, and support their happiness and productivity through generous health care, time off, and other benefits.

We try to foster a safe environment where we can take risks, and learn from our failures. While we value individual talents, we favor collaboration more. We believe that the leadership of the company works for the employees, not the other way around. We feel strongly that our employees guide who we are as a company and the work we create, so we look for characteristics of curiosity, empathy, respect, honesty, and courage in every candidate.

Though we’ve delivered a lot of crazy stuff, here are a few you can check out at home:

Mission: ISS

Disney Pixar Coco VR

Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab

The Lion King - Virtual Production

Elixir