Senior Technical Artist - VALORANT, Premium Content

Riot Games•Los Angeles, CA

6d•$185,200 - $258,000

About The Position

Technical Artists at Riot blend artistic sensibility with deep technical expertise to create performant, expressive, and scalable player-facing content. As a Senior Technical Artist on the VALORANT Premium Content team, you will operate at the frontier of cosmetic innovation driving initiatives that define the future of premium content. In this role, you will focus on prototyping and architecting next-generation systems that expand what weapon skins and cosmetic features can do. You will work in highly ambiguous spaces, translating creative ambition into technically viable solutions, and building foundational frameworks that scale across teams and future content. You will act as a technical leader and domain expert, shaping direction, mentoring others, and raising the bar for both craft and innovation.

Requirements

7+ years of experience as a Technical Artist in games or real-time engines
Deep expertise in Unreal Engine, including: Advanced Blueprint architecture and debugging
Strong familiarity with C++ for extending engine/system capabilities
Animation systems, Anim Graphs, and procedural techniques
Proven experience owning complex, ambiguous technical problems from concept through production
Experience building scalable systems/frameworks used by multiple developers or teams
Strong understanding of real-time performance, memory, and optimization strategies
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence and mentorship
Experience collaborating deeply across multiple disciplines

Nice To Haves

Experience driving incubation work on shipped or prototype features
Strong background in systems design or gameplay-adjacent architecture
Experience with procedural animation, simulation systems, or physics-driven features
Familiarity with rendering pipelines, shaders (HLSL), or advanced material workflows
Experience building extensible tools and pipelines at scale

Responsibilities

Drive efforts for new cosmetic systems, exploring unproven ideas and translating them into production-ready frameworks
Architect scalable Blueprint and hybrid (Blueprint + C++) systems for advanced, reactive cosmetic features
Prototype rapidly to validate creative and technical feasibility, then evolve prototypes into deployable modules.
Define and evangelize best practices for system design, performance, and cross-discipline integration
Partner with Art, Animation, VFX, Design, and Engineering to push the boundaries of premium content
Lead development of foundational systems across: Advanced weapon logic and modular state architectures, Procedural and systemic animation integrations, Complex event-driven ecosystems (multi-layered reactivity, progression, personalization), Cross-system features (UI, gameplay hooks, progression systems)
Identify long-term technical opportunities and risks, influencing roadmap and team strategy
Mentor other Technical Artists, providing guidance on architecture, debugging, and system design
Develop tools, frameworks, and pipelines that unlock team-wide efficiency and scalability
Profile and optimize experimental systems, ensuring viability within performance constraints