Technical Art Director

What we are looking for:

Escape Velocity is seeking a Technical Art Director to take ownership of the technical side of visual development. In this role, you will serve as the crucial bridge between artists and engineers, working closely with all art disciplines to streamline workflows, create tools for artists, and ensure maximum efficiency and quality in visual targets within our projects. You and your team will turn creative visions into technical realities.

As the Technical Art Director, you will lead the Technical Art & Animation teams, directing, defining, and implementing efficient, high-quality content production workflows and technologies. Your expertise in the technical art field will be critical in managing content production pipelines, asset optimization, tools scripting, shader development and more. You will assume ownership of any technical art challenges that arise, delegating tasks and empowering team members across all experience levels to ship the products and achieve successful resolutions.

Requirements

What we will do together:

• Work proactively with Art Directors, Art Leads to understand scope, vision, content workflows and the challenges they face to identify how to help them improve
• Act as a representative on studio wide technical art topics.
• Act as the primary point of contact for Technical Art issues, proactively resolving problems and addressing roadblocks.
• Continuously monitor project progress, providing updates to production and stakeholders, adjusting priorities as needed.
• Work with production and scheduling teams to define realistic timelines and manage project priorities.
• Manage a team of technical artists and technical animators tobuild tools, create and refine workflows, and design systems for artists; operating within the limit of the game engine to meet or maximize visual specs. 
• Define & Sustain performance budget guidelines for art teams for multiple platforms.
• Advise the quality verification team in the building of better workflow tests
• Maximize your team’s output by identifying and removing technical and process barriers.
• Ensure effective contributions from our Co-Dev partners; ensure they are part of the team.
• Foster a positive, proactive, and agile work environment that encourages innovation, collaboration and releasing.

• 9+ years of experience working in Art, or Technical Art roles, with consistent increasing complexity.
• 3+ years of leadership or management experience.
• Released Unreal Engine Game & taking multiple projects to ship.
• Development experience for multiple platforms, ideally including mobile.
• Deep knowledge and experience developing art solutions in Unreal Engine
• Understanding of risk management principles and demonstrated ability to put them into practice.
• Customer-service mindset to enable and support our success while setting clear boundaries of responsibility.
• Proven leadership skills and a willingness to take initiative to communicate, coordinate, and negotiate between different disciplines with kindness and respect
• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively with a high degree of detail with peers, partners, and different cultural groups across multiple disciplines with an added ability to clearly express technical material with non-technical audiences.
• A positive force multiplier with a great team-player attitude.
• Highly detail-oriented, deadline-driven, and able to embrace change for a fast-growing organization.
• Excellent organizational and written communication skills.

Benefits

Interested… a bit about Escape Velocity:

Escape Velocity is a team of passionate, talented developers working at a studio that offers excellent benefits and what we believe is a fantastic project. But that doesn’t make us unique. What does make us special? We value the time, energy, and talent of our players and our colleagues. We want every hour spent developing and playing our games to be an incredibly rewarding and worthwhile use of your time. To that end, we are fully remote and support team members nearly anywhere in the world.  We prioritize honesty, even when that means sharing bad news. We strive to give everyone autonomy so they can determine how best to work and play, and we care more about what you bring to the game and studio than how many hours you’re clocking. We believe in constant improvement across all areas – from the game itself to our production design – and are constantly re-evaluating how we spend our time to ensure that we’re not wasting yours and we’re all always working on the most important things. Finally (and perhaps most importantly) we’re dedicated to building a culture of play, which not only makes us better game makers, but also strengthens the bonds between us all.

How to apply:

Click apply and complete an application along with a Resume / CV. If we would like to move forward with your application, a member of the Recruiting Team will reach out to you and guide you through our process.

Escape Velocity is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to hiring, promoting, and compensating employees based on their qualifications and demonstrated ability to perform job responsibilities.

Applications will be conside