[Hiring] Lighting Team Lead @Room 8 Group

Role Description

We’re looking for a Lighting Team Lead with a strong artistic eye, deep technical expertise, and extensive production experience to drive the quality and professional development of the Lighting discipline across the studio. The Lighting Team Lead acts as the primary artistic and technical expert for Lighting, supporting Lighting Leads and Artists across multiple projects.

• Help solve complex lighting challenges.
• Review projects and key deliveries when needed.
• Contribute to new project estimations.
• Ensure a consistently high artistic and technical standard.
• Work closely with Lighting Leads, the Team Manager, Art Directors, Technical Artists, and production teams.
• Focus on lighting expertise, quality, workflows, and hard-skill development.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary artistic and technical expert for Lighting across the studio.
• Support Lighting Leads and Artists in solving complex or unusual artistic and technical lighting challenges.
• Maintain and develop lighting quality standards, workflows, documentation, and best practices.
• Perform high-level project and delivery reviews when additional expertise or quality validation is required.
• Participate in new project estimation, evaluating lighting scope, complexity, technical requirements, risks, and required expertise.
• Support Lighting Leads during project kick-offs and key production stages with lighting approaches, benchmarks, workflows, and technical solutions.
• Mentor Lighting Leads and Artists and drive the hard-skill development of the Lighting team through feedback, training, knowledge sharing, and technical guidance.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing between projects and ensure successful solutions and practices are reused across the studio.
• Participate in technical interviews and portfolio reviews for Lighting Artist and Lighting Lead candidates.
• Collaborate with Art Direction, Technical Art, Environment Art, VFX, Cinematics, and Production to solve cross-discipline lighting challenges.

Requirements

• Extensive experience as a Lead Lighting Artist, Senior Lighting Artist, Lighting Supervisor, or similar senior role, preferably on AAA projects.
• Expert understanding of light, color, composition, atmosphere, visual storytelling, and gameplay readability.
• Strong professional knowledge of both Unreal Engine and Unity, including lighting, rendering, post-processing, and profiling workflows.
• Advanced knowledge of real-time and baked lighting techniques, including Lumen, light baking, lightmaps, reflections, exposure, and post-processing.
• Strong understanding of real-time rendering, performance optimisation, PBR workflows, and lighting pipelines.
• Ability to select appropriate lighting solutions based on visual targets, technical requirements, platform constraints, and performance budgets.
• Strong ability to diagnose and solve complex artistic and technical lighting problems.
• Experience reviewing lighting work and providing clear, actionable professional feedback.
• Experience mentoring and developing the technical and artistic skills of Lighting Artists and Leads.
• Good understanding of production processes and the ability to evaluate lighting scope and complexity during project estimation.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating mastery of lighting for mood, storytelling, gameplay, and technical execution.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with custom or proprietary game engines and adapting lighting knowledge to unfamiliar rendering pipelines.
• Experience supporting multiple projects or Lighting Leads.
• Experience with project estimation, pre-production, and technical evaluation of new projects.
• Experience conducting technical interviews and portfolio reviews.
• Experience creating lighting documentation, training materials, or internal technical standards.
• Knowledge of color grading, tone mapping, HDR workflows, scripting, Blueprints, or lighting automation.
• Experience working closely with Technical Art or Rendering teams on tools, optimisation, and engine-level lighting solutions.