Principal Lighting Artist

Role overview Set a high creative and technical standard for real-time lighting across a narrative game project. You will craft distinctive environmental and character lighting that supports gameplay, directs player attention, and reinforces story mood, while maintaining visual consistency across the experience. The role also helps the wider team solve pipeline, performance, and quality challenges.

Responsibilities - Create and guide in-game lighting for environments and characters, balancing dramatic visual style with credible illumination and emissive values. - Shape compositions that lead the player through traversal and combat, establish clear visual hierarchy, and support intended emotional beats. - Help maintain consistent lighting quality and performance across the broader art team. - Diagnose pipeline and tooling issues, then collaborate with art leadership, graphics engineering, technical art, and tools teams on targeted improvements. - Identify and present opportunities to improve visual quality, efficiency, and performance across the project. - Mentor lighting artists and contribute constructively across disciplines, especially on ambiguous, high-impact work.

Requirements - Significant game-industry experience at senior or principal lighting-artist level; experience on large, complex productions is preferred. - Extensive real-time gameplay lighting experience, with an understanding of how lighting affects navigation, combat readability, and storytelling. - Strong eye for value, color, composition, and visual hierarchy. - Proficiency in Unreal Engine, with Unreal Engine 4 experience preferred, including end-to-end HDR and adaptive exposure considerations. - Familiarity with performance evaluation and optimization, and experience working with engineering or technical art teams. - Ability to work autonomously across disciplines, mentor others, and communicate creative and technical proposals clearly.

Nice to have - Interest in narrative-focused games, especially first-person shooters; background in traditional art, lighting, or cinematography; or experience collaborating with distributed teams.