[Hiring] Principal Lighting Artist @Ghost Story Games

Role Description

For the remote Principal Lighting Artist role, you should have extensive experience in real-time lighting in Unreal Engine 4, including particular emphasis on in-game environmental and character lighting and a deep experience set in post-process tuning, color grading, and balancing an end-to-end HDR pipeline across a broader lighting team.

As a Principal Lighting Artist, you will work closely with Creative and Art Direction, Design, and Tech as a key driver in maintaining the technical and aesthetic bar for lighting in Judas and ensuring a gameplay experience that is both beautiful and cohesive from start to end. This also includes executing on a unique, dramatic stylization to lighting of the world, while retaining rich credibility and consistency through an expert understanding of a ‘physically plausible’ balance of lighting exposure, illumination and emissive intensities.

What You’ll Take On:

• Play a key role in pushing the visual and technical quality bar for lighting and helping troubleshoot any scalability and quality in execution across a broader lighting team.
• Help diagnose and prove out targeted refinements to the technical pipeline and custom tool set for lighting on Judas.
• Engage proactively and collaboratively with Art Leadership, Tools and Graphics Engineering, Tech Art to identify areas for quality, efficiency, or performance gains.
• Uphold the highest standards of aesthetic and technical quality of your own work.
• Identify opportunities for both visual and technical quality improvements across the project and effectively pitch to project leadership.

Qualifications

• Established experience in the game industry as a Senior to Principal Lighting Artist, preferably on larger, complex productions.
• Extensive experience in lighting for real-time gameplay.
• Adept at crafting stunning scenes and leveraging a deep understanding of the gameplay experience.
• Expert eye for value, color, composition and crafting deliberate visual hierarchy reads.
• Proficient art and technical experience within Unreal (Unreal 4 preferred).
• Technical experience in balancing game-spanning illumination and emissive standards for adaptive-exposure and HDR.
• Familiarity with performance evaluation and optimization.

Requirements

• Proactive problem solver that enjoys cross-department collaboration.
• Ability to thoughtfully pitch both creative and visual ideas, as well as technical and process improvements.
• Experience and mindfulness towards both individual and team efficiency.
• Proven ability to work on more challenging cross-functional tasks with a high degree of ambiguity and autonomy.
• Serve as a significantly positive force multiplier across the team.
• Mentor other Lighting Artists and help them solve problems.

Great to Have:

• Passion for deeply narrative-driven games, particularly First Person Shooters.
• Additional traditional art, lighting, or cinematography background.
• Experience working effectively and collaboratively with a diverse mix of internal and distributed teams.

Benefits

• The pay range for this position in Massachusetts at the start of employment is expected to be between $130,900 and $170,120 per Year.
• Base pay offered is based on market location and may vary depending on individualized factors.
• The total compensation package may include other elements, including a bonus and/or equity awards.
• Details of participation in compensation and benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

When Applying For This Position:

• Please watch the following GDC talk given by Ken Levine: GDC Talk .
• Ghost Story does not conduct job interviews or make job offers over third-party messaging apps.
• Ghost Story does not engage in any financial exchanges during the recruitment or onboarding process.
• Ghost Story’s in-house recruitment team will only contact individuals through their official Ghost Story email addresses.

Company Description

As an equal opportunity employer, Ghost Story Games, LLC (“Ghost Story”) is committed to fostering and celebrating the diverse thoughts, cultures, and backgrounds of its talent, partners, and communities throughout its organization.