Principal Environment Artist

Epic Games • Cary, NC

8h

About The Position

Epic Games is seeking a Principal Environment Artist to help define and elevate the visual quality of Fortnite’s worlds. This role combines hands-on environment art production, artistic leadership, and technical problem-solving. You will create benchmark-quality work, establish visual standards, develop scalable workflows, and solve complex artistic and technical challenges. Working closely with Art Direction, Technical Art, Design, Engineering, and Production, you will help align visual quality with gameplay, performance, memory, and production requirements while mentoring artists and advancing environment art practices across the project.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or at least 10 years of progressive professional experience creating real-time 3D environments for commercially released video games
• Professional experience creating production-ready environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete real-time scenes
• Professional experience using Unreal Engine for environment world-building, PBR materials, lighting, content implementation, and optimization
• Professional experience optimizing real-time environment content for performance, memory usage, visual quality, and multiple hardware platforms
• Professional experience using a 3D content creation application such as Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender; texture-authoring software such as Substance Painter or Substance Designer; and image-editing software such as Photoshop or equivalent professional tools
• Experience developing or improving environment art workflows, pipelines, documentation, or quality standards
• Experience reviewing the work of other artists and providing actionable artistic and technical feedback
• Experience mentoring or providing professional guidance to environment artists
• Portfolio demonstrating professional environment artwork, including examples of 3D modeling, materials, composition, lighting, world-building, and completed real-time environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and demonstrated experience collaborating with multidisciplinary development teams

Nice To Haves

• Experience developing large-scale worlds for a AAA, multiplayer, or continuously updated game
• Experience with procedural environment creation, advanced material systems, shader workflows, terrain systems, or environment art tools
• Experience establishing visual benchmarks and discipline-wide quality standards
• Experience collaborating with external development partners or reviewing externally produced environment artwork
• Experience delivering environment content across multiple platforms with different performance and memory constraints

Responsibilities

• Create benchmark-quality environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete scenes that establish the visual quality bar for Fortnite
• Establish and maintain environment art standards across composition, lighting, color, atmosphere, materials, visual storytelling, gameplay readability, and environmental polish
• Develop and improve scalable environment art workflows that increase visual quality, consistency, production efficiency, and content reuse across the project
• Partner with Technical Art and Engineering to develop content creation pipelines, and maintain environment art documentation, best practices, workflows, and quality standards
• Identify and resolve complex artistic and technical problems while balancing visual quality, runtime performance, memory usage, platform requirements, and production schedules
• Mentor artists across different experience levels by providing technical guidance, artistic critique, workflow support, and professional development
• Evaluate emerging tools, technologies, and production techniques and recommend improvements that meaningfully advance the environment art team’s capabilities

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision HRA
• Long Term Disability
• Life Insurance
• 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health (free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents)
• Company events
• Company-wide paid breaks
• Unlimited PTO
• Unlimited sick time
• Paid sabbatical for 7 years of employment

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal