Unity Technical Artist

Job Description

Position Overview
As a  Unity Technical Artist, you will serve as the vital bridge between our creative and technical teams. Supporting multiple agile sprint teams simultaneously, you will be responsible for the integration, optimization, and enhancement of visual assets and systems in Unity. Your primary mission is to ensure that our game prototypes not only look polished but also run efficiently across devices, especially within the fast-paced world of hyper/hybrid casual mobile game development.

Role and Responsibilities

Polish & Game Feel Enhancement

• Visual Polish Ownership: Collaborate closely with artists and designers throughout development to ensure consistent visual style, color grading, lighting, and material fidelity. Identify and resolve visual inconsistencies between assets and the final in-game presentation. Contribute to post-processing profiles, LUTs, and fine-tuning of shaders or materials to enhance the final look.
• Game Feel Support:  Enhance gameplay feedback by integrating timing-sensitive visual effects, snappy transitions, and animation curve tuning. Collaborate with designers and developers to improve the juiciness of interactions—through screen shake, particle bursts, squish/stretch animations, and timing adjustments—ensuring that the game feels responsive, expressive, and emotionally engaging.
• Pre/Post-Launch Polishing Process:  Take part in polishing passes near project milestones (e.g., blocking phase, prototyping phase, soft launch phase), identifying gaps in visual cohesion and interaction feel. Proactively suggest and implement solutions earlier in the pipeline to reduce post-production rework, while still contributing to final refinements where necessary.

Art & Asset Implementation

• Visual Asset Integration: Import, organize, and implement 2D and 3D assets (characters, props, environments, VFX, UI) into Unity while maintaining consistency, performance, and polish.
• Shader & VFX Development: Design and implement visually compelling VFX and custom shaders using Shader Graph or HLSL to enhance gameplay feedback and player experience, while ensuring performance efficiency across mobile devices.
• Rigging & Animation Support: Collaborate with animators and developers to set up character rigs, animations, blend trees, and animation events as needed.
• Shader Performance Optimization:  Balance quality and performance by optimizing shader complexity, draw calls, and visual effects to support smooth gameplay on low- and mid-end mobile devices.
• Mobile Performance Fidelity : Maintain visual fidelity while ensuring high frame rate and low memory impact on mobile platforms.

Technical Optimization

• Performance Tuning: Identify and resolve bottlenecks related to draw calls, texture memory, lighting, and other rendering performance issues, particularly for mobile platforms.
• Build Size Optimization: Help reduce APK/IPA size by managing texture compression, asset bundles, and resource loading workflows.
• Scene Management: Organize Unity scenes and prefabs efficiently to ensure smooth loading, scalability, and runtime performance.

Pipeline & Tool Development

• Pipeline Automation : Build and maintain efficient art and animation pipelines, automating repetitive tasks (e.g., asset import, compression, texture setup) to support faster iteration cycles & integration and reduce manual errors.
• Custom Tools & Scripts: Create or support the development of tools, scripts, and workflows that improve the speed and quality of production for artists and developers.
• Asset Validation: Ensure art assets follow best practices and meet project constraints (e.g., polycount, texture resolution, compression formats).
• Version Control: Manage and maintain art content via Git or similar tools in alignment with the development team.

Collaboration & Communication

• Cross-Functional Support: Serve multiple teams by jumping between projects based on sprint needs and asset readiness.
• Cross-Disciplinary Feedback : Contribute actively in team discussions and sprint ideation by offering creative and technical feedback that aligns with the product vision and improves overall gameplay and presentation quality.
• Agile Participation: Attend sprint planning, reviews, and stand-ups to align with designers, developers, and artists.
• Technical Mentorship: Provide guidance and support to junior artists regarding Unity best practices and performance constraints.

Mobile-Specific Responsibilities

• Device Compatibility: Ensure consistent visual quality across a wide range of mobile devices and resolutions.
  Touch Feedback: Implement satisfying visual effects that respond to player interactions (e.g., tap, swipe).
• Monetization-Ready Visuals: Work on ad-friendly transitions, VFX, and animations that support monetization strategies.

Job Requirements

Requirements and Expectations

Technical Requirements

• Core Skills : At least 3 years of Unity technical artist expertise with Solid Unity knowledge and a strong grasp of real-time rendering, shaders, and VFX systems. Experience working with Unity’s rendering pipeline (URP/HDRP), shader programming (HLSL/Shader Graph), and GPU performance optimization techniques.
• Profiling Tools : Hands-on experience with Unity Profiler, RenderDoc, and GPU debuggers to identify performance bottlenecks and implement real-time optimizations for memory, CPU, and GPU usage.
• Rigging & Animation Tools:  Familiarity with Unity’s Animation Rigging package, Mecanim, Spine, or procedural animation systems is a plus for supporting character and environment animation pipelines.
• Scripting Knowledge: Proficiency in C#, Python, or other relevant scripting for tools and integration tasks (gameplay-focused).
• Performance Optimization : Proven experience with mobile game performance optimization and asset pipelines, and ability to optimize games for both high- and low-end devices.
• Artistic Sensibility:  Understanding of aesthetics, color theory, motion, and UI/UX principles to ensure visual appeal.
• Tool Familiarity : Knowledge of Unity tools like Animation, Physics, Lighting, Particle Systems, and UI Canvas.
• Third-Party SDKs : Experience with mobile SDKs such as Firebase, Unity Ads, or Google Play Services.
• Version Control : Comfortable using Git or similar version control systems.
• LiveOps Experience : Experience supporting LiveOps pipelines and tools for ongoing content updates, seasonal events, or asset refresh cycles is a strong plus.
• Free-to-Play KPI Awareness : Understanding how visual quality, clarity, and user feedback directly influence key metrics like retention, click-through rates, and session length in free-to-play mobile games.

Tools & Technology

• Unity (URP or Built-in)
• Shader Graph, VFX Graph, or hand-coded shaders
• Blender, Maya, or 3ds Max (for rigging/modeling support)
• Photoshop/Illustrator or other 2D tools
• Git, Asana, Slack (or similar platforms)

Key Attributes

• Strong eye for visual fidelity combined with technical precision.
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Ability to manage workload across multiple active sprint teams.
• Team player who communicates clearly and can balance art and tech requirements.