Principal Lighting Artist (Santa Monica)

Principal Lighting Artist

We are seeking a Principal Lighting Artist to lead the creative and technical vision for lighting across our project. In this role, you will define the mood, atmosphere, and storytelling through advanced lighting design, ensuring consistency and emotional impact across environments and cinematics. You will work closely with art, design, and engineering teams to balance artistic goals with gameplay and performance requirements, while also mentoring junior artists, setting best practices, and driving innovation in real-time lighting techniques.

Core Responsibilities :

• Lighting key areas of our game experience with performant techniques through a combination of real-time lighting and post process solutions.
• Establish a robust lighting ruleset system for a variety of natural and urban environments.
• Champion the lighting discipline across departments as a vital component of design, narrative and tone across the game.
• Through hands on Look Dev, collaborate with directors to establish the project vision for Lighting.
• Develop lighting pipelines that can scale into production both internally and externally.
• Develop lighting states for a system of dynamically changing lighting and weather situations.
• Collaborate closely with Material Artist counterparts across internal and external teams. Ensuring continuity of quality, style, execution and efficiency in our process.
• Define pipelines supporting assets from Substance Designer and Substance Painter that incorporate scan data into these workflows.
• Work with production, leads and directors to ensure lighting goals are delivered on time and to quality.
• Mentor and provide feedback to other Lighting Artists, fostering a culture of artistic growth and excellence.

Core Qualifications :

Plus If :

Description :

The base pay range for this position is $160,000 to $185,000 per year. Actual compensation is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. We also offer a competitive package of benefits including vacation time, sick time, company holidays, parental leave, medical / dental / vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) matching to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.