Principal Environment Artist

What We Do

Push your artistic talent to the limit on a team of world-class environment, character and concept artists who strive to innovate and inspire.

What You'll Do

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.

What we're looking for

• 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
• Preferably 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Company Information

Founded in 1991, Epic Games is an American company founded by CEO Tim Sweeney. The company is headquartered in Cary, North Carolina and has dozens of offices worldwide. Epic is a leading interactive entertainment company and provider of 3D engine technology. Epic operates one of the world’s largest games, Fortnite, which is a vibrant ecosystem of social entertainment experiences including first-party games like Fortnite Battle Royale, LEGO Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Fortnite Festival, as well as creator-made experiences. Epic has over 800 million accounts and over 6 billion friend connections across Fortnite, Fall Guys, Rocket League, and the Epic Games Store. The company also develops Unreal Engine, which powers many of the world’s leading games and is also adopted across industries such as film and television, broadcast and live events, architecture, automotive, and simulation. Through Fortnite, Unreal Engine, Epic Games Store, and Epic Online Services, Epic provides an end-to-end digital ecosystem for developers and creators to build, distribute, and operate games and other content.