Lead Game Technical Artist I

Ainsworth Game Technology•Las Vegas, NV

About The Position

The Game Lead Technical Artist I is a technical leader who owns major pipeline domains and ensures the studio’s Unity content workflows are scalable, maintainable, and efficient. This role drives standards adoption, leads large optimization and tooling efforts, and mentors technical artists and content creators. The Game Lead Technical Artist I partners closely with Engineering and Art Leadership to align runtime constraints with product goals and schedules.

Requirements

4+ years of experience using Unity
4+ years of game development experience with significant technical art/tools ownership
Degree in Art, Animation, Computer Science/Engineering, or equivalent experience
Ability to provide and receive feedback
Unity experience (mandatory); familiarity with prefab workflows and asset import pipeline
Expert Unity pipeline and tooling experience (C#), including scalable architecture and maintainability
Strong real-time rendering/material knowledge and performance tradeoff decision-making
Strong cross-discipline communication and leadership without direct authority
Portfolio/case studies showing measurable pipeline efficiency or performance gains

Responsibilities

Produce high-quality animations using animation principles for characters, environments, UI, and VFX
Encourage and generate creative ideas and solutions with the team
Demonstrate excellent time management to deliver art and animations to the required quality, specification, and time
Design and maintain production-ready Unity pipelines (asset import/validation, shader systems, animation pipeline, build/content packaging, performance tooling)
Architect maintainable tool ecosystems (shared libraries, modular editor tooling, automated checks in CI/build pipelines where applicable)
Establish budgets/standards (texture memory, mesh density, rig complexity, shader complexity) and enforce through automation
Lead performance and memory initiatives across scenes/features; track, report, and improve key metrics
Partner with Engineers to integrate tooling into project workflows and version control (Perforce, GIT)
Superior level 3D artist, with ability to design optimized texture sheets for 3D assets implemented in Unity
Drive cross-project consistency: templates, starter content, documentation, training sessions, and review practices
Act as escalation point for complex production blockers; lead root-cause analysis and durable fixes
Mentor and develop Level I–III technical artists; contribute to hiring and interviewing