Interactive Experience Designer (Unity)

Lucid Dream • Durham, NC

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

Lucid Dream is a custom game and interactive experience studio that creates immersive and interactive experiences for VR/AR, mobile, desktop, and web for leaders in medical, scientific, and technical industries. They transform education and engagement through purposeful play. This role involves shaping the future of games-inspired science communication, immersive storytelling, and training. The designer will be an artist with a strong design sensibility and hands-on Unity experience to bring their work to life. This is a collaborative role where the artist will contribute to a shared visual vision, create polished assets, integrate them into Unity scenes, and handle setup and interactivity. The company is looking for an early adopter excited about new tools and pipelines, comfortable with scripting in Unity and exploring emerging tools like AI to enhance the creative process.

Requirements

• A portfolio that demonstrates high-quality, client-ready, brand-aligned polish.
• Strong affinity for organization and clean implementation at the project, scene, asset, and scripting levels.
• A strong artistic foundation and a refined eye for design, layout, brand style, and elegance, including visual design, composition, color, form, & motion.
• Comfort with animation fundamentals (timing, easing, motion design, object and UI animation; character animation is not required).
• Hands-on comfort working in Unity to integrate art assets, build and polish scenes, wire up basic interactions, and optimize for performance and platform constraints.
• Comfort working with Unity C# scripts, including with the assistance of AI coding tools.
• 3-5 years demonstrated experience working as part of a collaborative studio or in-house team.
• Working familiarity with version control for Unity projects (Unity Version Control, Perforce, Git, or similar), and the discipline to onboard quickly into our source control workflow.
• A genuine early-adopter mindset – actively seek out new tools, workflows, and pipelines, test them quickly, and bring the team along on what's worth keeping.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain creative and technical decisions clearly to both creative and client-facing audiences.
• Strong experience with 3D asset creation and animation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in agency, brand, marketing, or client-services creative, or any environment where polish and brand consistency were non-negotiable.
• Experience working with medically accurate art assets where details matter.
• Experience shipping mobile, desktop, or web-based interactive experiences alongside VR/XR work.
• Familiarity with Substance Painter, Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, or similar creative tools.
• Experience creating shaders, visual effects, lighting setups, or custom Unity editor tools.
• Familiarity with Apple Vision Pro, iOS, Unreal Engine, WebGL, or other interactive development platforms.
• Experience building reusable Unity prefabs, templates, design systems, or custom editor tools.
• Experience with XR development in Unity.

Responsibilities

• Create polished, design-forward art assets and contribute them to Unity scenes across VR, AR, desktop, mobile, and web-based experiences.
• Help build, organize, and polish Unity scenes alongside the team, including environments, UI, animation states, lighting, materials, shaders, and visual effects.
• Partner with the Creative Director and fellow artists to translate client vision, brand requirements, and scientific content into compelling, cohesive visuals.
• Handle the basic interactivity hookups needed to bring assets to life in a scene.
• Prototype visual and interactive concepts in Unity to quickly pressure-test ideas before they hit full production.
• Implement and refine art assets, animations, particle systems, UI elements, and interaction feedback inside Unity.
• Participate in playtesting, bug fixing, performance optimization, and polish throughout the project lifecycle.
• Support live deployments by helping troubleshoot visual or interaction issues and keeping assets deployment-ready.
• Bring an early-adopter mindset to the studio, actively exploring, evaluating, and piloting new tools, plugins, and pipelines (including generative AI for 2D/3D, AI coding assistants for Unity, and other emerging creative tech) and sharing what's worth adopting.
• Help define studio best practices for when and how new tools should be used in client-facing work, balancing speed and experimentation with quality, originality, and production needs.
• Contribute to reusable Unity templates, prefabs, interaction patterns, and production frameworks that make the team faster and more consistent over time.
• Work as a contributing artist on the team, integrating work cleanly into shared Unity scenes and using version control.
• Contribute to project planning by estimating asset needs and flagging production risks early.
• Troubleshoot visual, animation, and interaction issues in the work contributed, across platforms.
• Support a complex, high-performing team where multiple, months-long projects are worked on simultaneously.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Employer-sponsored health, vision, and dental
• 401(k) Retirement Plan with company match
• Responsible Paid Time-Off Policy
• Parental Leave Policy
• Downtown Durham office with parking
• Monthly team-building events
• The opportunity to help shape how emerging tools - including generative AI and real-time interactive tech - show up in our creative production

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed