About the role
Role Overview
Art Directors at Riot drive the quality and performance of their team, establishing direction and goals that provide clarity and focus. Scope of responsibilities include leading with vision, strategic partnership across the game, a deep understanding of audience resonance, overall team culture and performance, growth of direct reports, and directing the team on successful execution of vision and strategy.
As an Art Director for an unpublished R&D product, you will help bring the game’s visual direction to life in a new game for players around the world. You will translate creative direction into a distinctive, emotionally compelling, production-ready visual identity that supports gameplay, strengthens character appeal, and meets the craft bar players expect from Riot. You will partner closely with Creative Direction, Game Leadership, cross-disciplinary teams, and external partners to translate the game’s visual ambition into a cohesive, art direction.
Responsibilities
- Steward the game’s visual identity from concept through production
- Translate creative direction into clear visual standards, production practices, and scalable art workflows
- Drive visual quality, appeal, and gameplay readability across all player-facing art
- Apply deep expertise in the art style across art, animation, VFX, visual storytelling, and character-driven experiences
- Balance artistic ambition with technical requirements and production realities
- Build, lead, and mentor high-performing internal and external art teams
- Direct co-development partners, vendors, and distributed creative talent to deliver consistently high-quality work
- Partner across design, narrative, audio, engineering, product, and IP to ensure art strengthens the player experience
- Provide clear visual feedback through reviews, paintovers, references, and development guidance
- Maintain deep awareness of the art style, creative influences, and evolving player expectations
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of experience developing games, with 8+ years leading art teams
- Experience as an Art Director or key artistic decision maker on at least one shipped 3D game
- Experience delivering games with strong character appeal in both model and animation
- Strong understanding of the pipelines, production techniques, and technical constraints required to deliver stylized visuals in games
- Strong artistic judgment across character design, composition, shape language, color, lighting, animation, VFX, and gameplay readability
- Experience balancing visual quality against technical, production, platform, and team-size constraints
- Experience building, leading, mentoring, and aligning art teams across cross-functional game development
- Experience directing external vendors or distributed art teams
- Champion of healthy creative processes that support iteration, alignment, scalable production, and strong artistic quality
- Experience leveraging emerging technologies and workflows, to accelerate visual development while maintaining artistic quality, authorship, and creative integrity
- A portfolio demonstrating strong artistic judgment, visual clarity, compositional skill, and stylistic range
- Experience developing games in modern game engines (i.e. Unreal, Unity, etc)
Desired Qualifications
- Experience developing art direction for live-service, multiplayer, or other technically constrained games
- Experience with 3D games that place high demands on character appeal, animation, VFX, camera, gameplay readability, or combat clarity
- Working knowledge of stylized rendering techniques, VFX, animation, and visual clarity for gameplay
Success Factors
- Demonstrated craft expertise and a collaborative spirit that prioritizes the delight of players
- Personal relationship with games
- Embody player empathy and commitment to player experience
Perks and Benefits
- Work/life balance, including open paid time off policy and flexible work schedules
- Medical, dental, and life insurance
- Parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children
- 401k with company match
- Base salary range: $206,700.00 - $289,000.00 USD
- Incentive compensation, equity, and additional insurance benefits including short and long-term disability
Company Values
Riot Games focuses on putting players first. The company prioritizes collaborative teams where individuals are empowered to bring their unique perspectives. Riot Games is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations as required by law.