Technical Artist

Responsibilities

• Performance and optimization: Profile and optimize materials, geometry, textures, lighting, shadows, foliage, and visual effects for large-scale RTS battles.
• Materials and shaders: Build scalable materials and shaders supporting faction colors, damage states, construction effects, and gameplay-driven visuals.
• Art pipeline: Build reliable workflows between Maya, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine 5 for asset preparation, importing, validation, and automation.
• Tools development: Create tools and scripts that reduce repetitive work and improve iteration speed for artists and designers.
• Environment systems: Develop workflows for landscapes, foliage, instancing, procedural placement, and level assembly across RTS camera distances.
• Gameplay visual integration: Connect art and effects to gameplay, including construction, destruction, damage feedback, abilities, and world-space indicators.
• Destruction systems: Build and optimize destruction for vehicles, structures, and environments using Chaos and other techniques, covering fracturing, damage states, debris, and effects.
• Visual effects support: Help VFX artists integrate, troubleshoot, and optimize Niagara systems and materials while maintaining gameplay readability.
• Technical problem-solving: Resolve rendering, shading, lighting, geometry, texture, import, and performance issues across the art pipeline.
• Standards and documentation: Define asset budgets, naming conventions, material and LOD guidelines, validation checks, and production documentation.

Mandatory Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional technical art experience in games.
• Strong Unreal Engine 5 experience in asset integration, rendering, and production tools.
• Advanced knowledge of the Material Editor, master materials, material instances, and shader optimization.
• Strong understanding of lighting, shadows, geometry, texture memory, draw calls, shader complexity, and overdraw.
• Hands-on experience profiling and resolving performance bottlenecks in Unreal Engine.
• Experience with LODs, instancing, culling, and scalability settings.
• Hands-on Chaos Destruction experience, including Geometry Collections, fracturing, clustering, physics fields, and runtime optimization.
• Hands-on experience integrating and implementing VFX in Unreal Engine 5, including Niagara systems and runtime performance optimization.
• Experience integrating art and visual systems with gameplay alongside developers.
• Working knowledge of Blueprints, HLSL, C++, or Unreal Engine editor plugins.
• Experience with Unreal Engine's PCG framework, landscapes, and large-scale foliage.
• Able to work independently and collaborate with artists, animators, designers, and developers.
• At least one shipped game with a significant personal contribution.
• Fluent in written and spoken English.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Houdini, and procedural pipelines.
• Knowledge of Maya and Substance Painter workflows, including topology, UVs, baking, and texture preparation.
• Tool development and automation experience using Python, editor scripting, or similar solutions.
• Experience creating real-time VFX using Niagara, including weapon effects, explosions, abilities, and environmental effects.
• Experience evaluating and optimizing Nanite, Lumen, and Virtual Shadow Maps.
• Experience with RTS, strategy, or high-unit-count games.
• A passion for RTS games.

Benefits and Perks

• The Forefront of PC Development: Join one of Israel's few studios building a high-fidelity, hardcore PC strategy game in Unreal Engine 5.
• Fully Remote: Work remotely with clear communication, personal ownership, and focused collaboration.
• A Veteran Team: Work with experienced developers and artists who share a passion for RTS and high production standards.
• Growth Potential: Expand your influence, ownership, and responsibility as the studio and Defcon Zero grow.
• Direct Impact: Shape the game's visuals, performance, and production through your tools and technical solutions.
• Collaborative Culture: Join a friendly, dedicated team committed to the professional standards needed to ship a top-tier game.