Principal Technical Artist
Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA) — Full-Time
We are seeking a Principal Technical Artist to help bring the next generation of content creation workflows into production. This is a senior individual contributor role focused on solving open-ended content, rendering, and pipeline challenges at the intersection of real-time graphics, simulation, and AI.
You will work closely with rendering, simulation, and content engineering teams while moving fluidly between Unreal Engine, Houdini, Python, shader development, and emerging AI tools. Your technical judgment and creative problem-solving will directly influence how environments are built to train and validate autonomous systems.
The Principal Technical Artist will own and evolve the technical content stack that transforms artistic intent into scalable, production-ready environments. This role combines deep technical expertise with strong artistic sensibility and requires someone who can build tools, optimize performance, and establish repeatable workflows that accelerate content creation across teams.
The ideal candidate is both a builder and a technical leader who thrives in ambiguity, prototypes quickly, and helps establish best practices that elevate the entire organization.
What You'll Do
- •Own end-to-end asset pipelines, procedural tooling, material systems, performance budgets, and content validation workflows
- •Build scalable systems that transform artistic concepts into production-ready scenes
- •Develop tooling in Unreal Engine and Houdini that significantly improves content team productivity
- •Create practical solutions that artists actively adopt and use in production
- •Introduce modern AI techniques into content creation pipelines, including Gaussian splatting, neural texture synthesis, and machine learning-assisted asset generation
- •Establish best practices for where AI tools should and should not be used in production environments
- •Profile and optimize GPU and CPU performance within Unreal Engine
- •Support both interactive experiences and large-scale batch simulations
- •Identify performance bottlenecks and codify improvements into reusable standards
- •Partner closely with content, rendering, simulation, machine learning, and product teams
- •Balance visual fidelity with runtime performance requirements
- •Translate technical concepts across multiple disciplines
- •Set a high technical standard through hands-on contributions and mentorship by example
- •Prototype solutions to open-ended problems and deliver production-ready systems quickly
- •Continuously improve workflows based on team feedback
Required Qualifications
- •8+ years of experience as a Technical Artist or in a closely related role
- •Experience shipping at least one product built on a real-time physically based rendering pipeline
- •Expert-level Unreal Engine 5 experience, including materials, Blueprints, performance profiling, asset pipelines, and advanced rendering systems
- •Strong programming skills across some combination of Python, C++, HLSL, VEX, and shell scripting
- •Proven ability to independently scope and solve open-ended technical challenges
- •Strong familiarity with AI-assisted development and content creation workflows
- •Experience with LLM-powered coding tools and generative AI platforms
- •Excellent communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
- •Broad technical aptitude across content creation, tooling, rendering, performance, and pipelines
Preferred Qualifications
- •Hands-on experience with Gaussian Splatting, NeRFs, or similar scene reconstruction techniques
- •Experience with procedural content generation tools such as Houdini, Maya, Blender, 3DS Max, or Unreal PCG
- •Experience authoring Houdini Digital Assets (HDAs)
- •Familiarity with sensor simulation, including RGB cameras, LiDAR, radar, and autonomous system perception workflows
- •Experience with distributed rendering or cloud-based content pipelines
- •Strong background in mathematics, physics, computational graphics, or related fields
Why Join
- •Help shape the future of physical AI and autonomous systems
- •Work at the intersection of graphics, simulation, and AI
- •Solve highly complex technical challenges with significant autonomy
- •Partner with world-class engineering, machine learning, and content teams
- •Influence how next-generation virtual environments are built at scale
- •Join a highly collaborative and innovative organization