Senior II Technical Artist, World – Unannounced Game | Irvine, CA or Albany, NY

Blizzard Entertainment • Irvine, CA

8h • Hybrid

About The Position

At Blizzard, we craft genre-defining games and legendary worlds for all to share. Through unparalleled creativity and technical excellence, we create immersive universes and iconic experiences that are beloved across platforms, borders, backgrounds, and generations – only made possible by building a work environment that cultivates the artistry of game development and unleashes the aspirations of our people.
We are looking for a Senior II Technical Artist II, World to help craft a new, unannounced game for Blizzard. As a senior individual contributor, you will support and optimize world-building art production through deep technical and artistic expertise. You are a hands-on problem-solver who collaborates closely with artists, designers, and engineers to identify, diagnose, and resolve performance, workflow, and pipeline challenges while delivering high-quality world content at scale.
This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work from home. The potential home studio for this role is Irvine, CA or Albany, NY.

Requirements

• 12 years of professional experience working as a technical artist on AAA game-development teams.
• Confirmed experience shipping at least one major title in a relevant technical-art role.
• Proven experience supporting large-scale world-building pipelines in collaboration with art, design, and engineering teams.
• In-depth knowledge of AAA game engines, with a strong understanding of art implementation and integration methods.
• Comprehensive understanding of modern art pipelines and best practices, including proficiency with industry-standard 3D and 2D tools such as Houdini, Substance Designer, Maya, and Gaea.
• Strong understanding of physically based rendering principles.
• A solid technical foundation in scripting and tooling, including Blueprints, Python, HLSL, and C++.
• Ability to evaluate, debug, and optimize complex world-building content for performance and scalability.
• A team-oriented approach to your work, with a strong emphasis on collaboration and cross-disciplinary partnership.
• The ability to inspire and elevate others through technical leadership, mentorship, and enthusiasm for craft.
• A self-motivated, proactive problem-solver who can independently drive complex tasks to completion.
• A solid understanding of game development disciplines outside of technical art, such as lighting, VFX, characters, animation, audio, rendering, and systems.
• Portfolio with examples and detailed breakdowns showcasing world-focused technical artwork, tools, and problem-solving approaches.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working through early development and R&D phases of a project.
• Experience with Unreal Engine editor utility widgets, profiling, and validation tools.
• Passion for playing a wide variety of video games.

Responsibilities

• Directly contribute to establishing, improving, and maintaining landscape and terrain workflows in Unreal Engine.
• Apply a strong understanding of world-building pipelines, including LIDAR and satellite data, Gaea, manual sculpting and beautification, landscape patches, and dataset wrangling in Houdini.
• Create and support landscape materials demonstrating complex biome layering, RVT blending, weight mapping, displacement, and modern approaches to tiling avoidance.
• Create, optimize, and maintain reusable material functions and shaders that support scalable world production.
• Provide broader world-content support through procedural methods such as PCG, Houdini, Blueprint, and related systems.
• Act as a force-multiplier by providing technical support and guidance for a small team of artists and designers.
• Monitor performance and workflow efficiency, identify opportunities for optimization, and process improvement.
• Remain current on industry trends, including advancements in commercial game engines and world-building workflows.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

What This Job Offers

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