Sr. 3D Generalist, UX

Lucid Motors • Newark, CA

12h • $142,100 - $195,360

About The Position

Lucid is seeking a Senior 3D Technical Artist & Motion Designer to join its UX/UI team and help define the next generation of digital vehicle experiences. The role combines 3D design, motion, real-time rendering, and product development. It involves creating high-quality vehicle visualizations, real-time 3D assets, animations, and motion experiences for customer-facing applications, while ensuring performance in demanding embedded compute environments.

The successful candidate will work with UX/UI designers, vehicle designers, engineering, product, marketing, and other partners to establish visual quality and production processes for sophisticated 3D experiences. The role calls for strong visual judgment and technical expertise across 3D scene creation, vehicle rigging and animation, asset optimization for constrained GPU targets, engineering collaboration, and AI-assisted creative workflows.

The position spans real-time visualization, asset pipeline development and optimization, motion and experience design, prototyping, AI-enabled workflows, and cross-functional collaboration. Success means helping move ambitious concepts from vehicle design data through exploration, prototyping, and optimization into reliable production experiences that retain their visual intent on production hardware.

Lucid describes itself as an automotive company focused on creating mobility experiences through innovation, proprietary technology, and software-defined vehicle architecture. The company emphasizes combining performance, sustainability, design, and engineering, with design, engineering, and production conducted in-house across global offices and manufacturing facilities.

Requirements

• 5–8+ years of professional experience developing and shipping high-quality 3D content for customer-facing digital products.
• Demonstrated experience shipping real-time 3D content on resource-constrained compute platforms, such as automotive, embedded systems, mobile devices, game consoles, or AR/VR devices.
• Advanced experience with Unreal Engine or a comparable real-time 3D engine.
• Strong professional experience with Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects, including developing high-quality 3D, animation, and motion-graphics content.
• Expert understanding of real-time 3D fundamentals, including modeling and topology; UVs and texturing; PBR materials and shading; lighting; rigging; animation; cameras and composition; LOD and geometry optimization; texture and memory optimization; and real-time rendering performance.
• Strong motion-design sensibility, including timing, easing, transitions, choreography, and visual storytelling.
• Ability to work with high-complexity source assets and transform them into efficient, production-ready real-time content.
• Experience collaborating directly with software and graphics engineers to diagnose and resolve performance or rendering issues.
• Fluency with contemporary AI-assisted creative tools and workflows, and curiosity about generative AI's impact on 3D and motion production.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across creative and technical disciplines.
• A portfolio demonstrating visual craft and technical execution, including examples of shipped real-time 3D and motion content.

Nice To Haves

• Experience developing automotive HMI, digital cockpit, ADAS visualization, navigation, charging, or vehicle-state experiences.
• Experience working with vehicle CAD and converting engineering or design geometry into optimized real-time assets.
• Experience with shader development, procedural materials, particle systems, or other real-time visual-effects workflows.
• Familiarity with Houdini, Blender, Maya, Substance 3D, or comparable 3D content-creation applications.
• Familiarity with scripting or pipeline automation using Python or similar technologies.
• Experience developing content for embedded GPUs or environments where GPU, CPU, memory, bandwidth, and thermal constraints influence design decisions.
• Experience building reusable tools, templates, or pipelines that help designers produce and iterate on real-time content more efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Create high-quality real-time 3D vehicle models, renderings, environments, and visual experiences for customer-facing UX applications.
• Develop and maintain real-time content using Unreal Engine or comparable real-time 3D engines.
• Build production-quality content in Cinema 4D, including modeling, materials, lighting, cameras, animation, and rendering.
• Create and optimize materials, textures, lighting, shaders, geometry, LODs, and other assets for real-time applications.
• Establish lighting and rendering approaches that maintain a premium visual character across display and compute configurations.
• Rig and animate vehicles, vehicle components, cameras, and other objects for interactive product experiences.
• Produce motion graphics and animated 3D sequences communicating system states, vehicle behaviors, transitions, and product functionality.
• Prepare and optimize assets for resource-constrained production compute targets, balancing visual fidelity, frame rate, memory, loading performance, thermal considerations, and system limitations.
• Develop scalable asset pipelines that transform complex vehicle geometry and design data into production-ready real-time assets.
• Work with engineering teams to identify performance bottlenecks and make trade-offs involving visual quality, geometry, textures, lighting, effects, and runtime performance.
• Define standards and best practices for asset creation, naming, organization, versioning, optimization, and delivery.
• Support integration and validation of visual assets through development and production.
• Work with UX and interaction designers to translate experience concepts into motion behaviors, transitions, visual states, and 3D interactions.
• Support design ideation and rapid prototyping by creating 3D visualizations, motion studies, and interactive prototypes.
• Develop prototypes to evaluate motion, timing, camera behavior, lighting, materials, and real-time interactions before production.
• Help establish a coherent motion and 3D visual language across vehicle interfaces and related digital experiences.
• Use AI-assisted creative tools for ideation, visualization, asset development, iteration, and optimization.
• Explore generative AI and machine-learning workflows to accelerate production of 3D content.
• Help establish responsible, repeatable workflows combining traditional 3D production with AI capabilities.
• Partner with UX/UI Design, Vehicle Design, Engineering, Product, and other stakeholders from concept development through production.
• Manage the flow of 3D assets and requirements between design and engineering teams.
• Translate creative objectives into technically achievable solutions and communicate technical constraints to designers and stakeholders.
• Participate in design and technical reviews, presenting work and explaining visual and technical trade-offs.
• Help establish processes that enable design and engineering teams to work efficiently with complex vehicle and 3D data.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Life and disability coverage
• Paid time off
• Paid holidays
• Paid sick leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Eligible employees may participate in an equity program and/or discretionary annual cash incentive program

What This Job Offers

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