Principal Environment Artist

About the role

Epic Games is seeking a Principal Environment Artist to join our team. This role combines hands-on environment art production, artistic leadership, and technical problem-solving. The ideal candidate will create benchmark-quality work, establish visual standards, develop scalable workflows, and solve complex artistic and technical challenges.

Responsibilities

• Create benchmark-quality environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete scenes that establish the visual quality bar for Fortnite
• Establish and maintain environment art standards across composition, lighting, color, atmosphere, materials, visual storytelling, gameplay readability, and environmental polish
• Develop and improve scalable environment art workflows that increase visual quality, consistency, production efficiency, and content reuse across the project
• Partner with Technical Art and Engineering to develop content creation pipelines, and maintain environment art documentation, best practices, workflows, and quality standards
• Identify and resolve complex artistic and technical problems while balancing visual quality, runtime performance, memory usage, platform requirements, and production schedules
• Mentor artists across different experience levels by providing technical guidance, artistic critique, workflow support, and professional development
• Evaluate emerging tools, technologies, and production techniques and recommend improvements that meaningfully advance the environment art team’s capabilities

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or at least 10 years of progressive professional experience creating real-time 3D environments for commercially released video games
• Professional experience creating production-ready environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete real-time scenes
• Preferably professional experience using Unreal Engine for environment world-building, PBR materials, lighting, content implementation, and optimization
• Professional experience optimizing real-time environment content for performance, memory usage, visual quality, and multiple hardware platforms
• Professional experience using a 3D content creation application such as Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender; texture-authoring software such as Substance Painter or Substance Designer; and image-editing software such as Photoshop or equivalent professional tools
• Experience developing or improving environment art workflows, pipelines, documentation, or quality standards
• Experience reviewing the work of other artists and providing actionable artistic and technical feedback
• Experience mentoring or providing professional guidance to environment artists

Qualifications

• Portfolio demonstrating professional environment artwork, including examples of 3D modeling, materials, composition, lighting, world-building, and completed real-time environments
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and demonstrated experience collaborating with multidisciplinary development teams

Skills

• Experience developing large-scale worlds for a AAA, multiplayer, or continuously updated game
• Experience with procedural environment creation, advanced material systems, shader workflows, terrain systems, or environment art tools
• Experience establishing visual benchmarks and discipline-wide quality standards
• Experience collaborating with external development partners or reviewing externally produced environment artwork
• Experience delivering environment content across multiple platforms with different performance and memory constraints

Benefits

• Paid medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, life insurance, and a 401k with competitive match
• Robust mental well-being program through Modern Health, which provides free therapy and coaching for employees & dependents
• Events and company-wide paid breaks throughout the year
• Unlimited PTO and sick time
• 7-year paid sabbatical after 7 years of employment

Pay

Competitive salary based on experience and qualifications.

Schedule

Full-time position.