[Hiring] Technical Artist @Amber Studio

Role Description

Amber is looking for a Technical Artist to help bring a high-quality AA Unreal Engine 5 game to a cloud streaming platform. It's a large, content-heavy, choice-driven narrative game, built on one of the most recognized entertainment franchises. The platform itself reaches a massive audience.

The game has a stylized, non-photorealistic look, built on custom outline and post-process shaders. Your job is to fit it into a tighter hardware budget than the PC version without losing that look. The work spans:

• GPU profiling
• Content optimization
• Art style preservation
• Platform budgets
• Editor tooling

Visual quality and readability come first, ahead of raw framerate. This is about measured trade-offs, not blanket cuts.

You'll work with a team of Unreal engineers, technical artists, UX designers, QAs, and production. This is a content and GPU role, not a code role. Engine code, platform integration, CPU performance, and loading belong to engineering.

This is a remote contract engagement, expected to run about 4 months. Preferred working hours are 8am-5pm US Central Time. European candidates should overlap with a minimum of 8am-12pm US Central Time.

What to expect from the process

• Profile Preselection: Our Talent Acquisition team will review your profile.
• Talent Acquisition Screening: Selected candidates will be contacted to undergo an initial interview to discuss their experience, skills, and fit for the role.
• Test: Qualified candidates will be invited to complete an assessment to demonstrate their abilities.
• Interviews: Finalists will participate in technical and cultural interviews to assess their proficiency and compatibility with our team.

The quest (what you will do)

• Profile GPU cost and memory use with Unreal Insights, RenderDoc, and similar tools.
• Use profiling data to prioritize work. Verify that each change delivers a measurable gain without visible quality loss.
• Hand over non-art bottlenecks to engineering, with profiling data.
• Reduce shader cost, overdraw, draw calls, and texture memory.
• Tune Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps for performance.
• Create LODs and simplify materials where global settings fall short.
• Protect the art style. Check every optimization against the original look: outlines, shading, post-process effects, lighting mood, and fog.
• Check how line work and fine detail hold up under cloud streaming. Adjust content where needed.
• Define content budgets and help engineering tune scalability settings.
• Build editor tools and validation checks to catch budget issues.
• Flag visual and performance risks early. Explain trade-offs to internal and external stakeholders.

Qualifications

• At least 4 years as a technical artist in games, including large or complex projects.
• At least 3 years of hands-on Unreal Engine 4 or 5 experience.
• Proven experience profiling and optimizing content in production games using GPU and memory profiling tools.
• Strong knowledge of materials, textures, LODs, lighting, VFX, and animation.
• Hands-on production experience with Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps.
• Strong grasp of real-time rendering, including shader and material optimization, overdraw reduction, and texture memory management.
• Experience building Unreal editor tools or validation scripts.
• Experience with Perforce or a similar version control system.
• Comfortable explaining visual and performance trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, in English, spoken and written.

Nice to have

• Experience optimizing stylized, non-photorealistic, or heavily post-processed visuals.
• Understanding of how cloud streaming and video encoding affect visual quality.
• Experience porting or downporting games to lower-spec hardware.
• Experience with Unreal Engine 5.5 or later.
• Experience working with outsourced teams and external development partners.
• Shipped at least one AAA or high-quality AA title.

Benefits

• A fun and dynamic industry where you can make a difference.
• Professional and friendly work environment.
• Awesome and talented colleagues.
• Support from all your teammates.