Principal Technical Artist - Optimization

Job Description

We are looking for a highly talented, motivated, and experienced person to work with us on XDefiant, a new multiplatform online multiplayer action game based in our San Francisco studio. XDefiant is a free-to-play, fast-paced arena shooter that combines intense gunplay with personalized loadouts and specialized factions, as teams of gunfighters battle for domination.

Job Description

Ubisoft San Francisco is looking for a Principal Technical Artist, focused on Performance Optimization, to join our Technical Art team. As the Performance Senior Technical Artist you will be responsible for analyzing game content and levels from a performance standpoint and setting budgets, standards, and best practices for cutting edge real-time projects resulting in the highest quality content running at target framerates on target hardware.

You'll also be part of the diverse Ubisoft San Francisco team. We embrace a variety of work situations based on what is best for the team, and we welcome people working in our SF office, remotely within the continental US, or some combination of the two. We put a priority on supporting our team members and what makes them happiest and most productive.

WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Create performance benchmarks tests, analyze the data resulting from them, and provide actionable tasks to optimize content while maintaining visual quality.
- Work closely with rendering engineers and quality assurance to monitor and debug performance related bottlenecks and overages
- Ascertain potential automation opportunities in our performance analysis pipeline
- Plan, enact, and enforce the best practices for authoring optimized content given specific hardware targets
- Provide discipline performance budgets and content targets specific to target hardware, software
- Write technical documentation clearly and precisely for different audiences
- Maintain a clear & precise communication chain between all stakeholders (Artists and Programmers)
- Drives the standardization of tools, workflows, project templates, and best practices in the realm of real-time optimization
- Assess, alter, and integrate assets (eg. Meshes, Textures) to diagnose how to improve memory footprints and/or decrease performance cost.
- Working closely with various art departments to guide them through creating art assets optimized to our game engine.
- Work with engine team to manage and improve our performance/optimization feature set.
- Provide and maintain tools to empower artist guided real-time performance monitoring, best practices, and transparency

Qualifications

WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- Strong knowledge in Maya, 3DS Max or similar 3D program.
- Experience creating performant game assets inside of a game engine.
- Ability to grasp new programs and systems quickly.
- Self-motivation and excellent problem-solving skills.
- Strong communication and time management skills.
- Ability to work with multiple development disciplines effectively.
- Ability to work with both Artists/Programmers to achieve standards set by Directors
- Ability to debug non-performant game scenarios and art content in engine
- Strong grasp of real-time rendering engines like Unreal Engine or Unity, their provided profiling tools, and their optimal configurations related to the performance needs of the target hardware, software, and distribution.
- Good knowledge of real-time rendering rendering pipelines and be able to troubleshoot and diagnose performance bottlenecks
- Strong grasp of real-time content creation pipelines and the impact of well authored assets on runtime performance
- Good knowledge of content optimization techniques, strategies, and engine configurations.
- A passion for creating efficient and stable workflows that allow artists to focus on content creation
- Ability to read/write HLSL/GLSL/Node Based Shader Graphs
- Ability to profile Shaders, Materials and generic Art Assets
- Experience using a profiler to pinpoint and optimize problems in game assets
- Ability to explain the passes in a rendered frame
- Understanding of how a pixel is being rendered on screen
- Knowledge in at least 1 programming or scripting language (C#, Python, C/C++)
- Experience developing and shipping a professional game project start to finish

BONUS
- Knowledge of software development tools such as visual studio
- Console development experience on any platform of Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo (handheld consoles)
- Good knowledge of tool development either using Python, C#, C++, or visual scripting tools like Unreal Engine Blueprints
- Experience using Houdini or other Procedural content pipelines

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-rz2303-3-145-135-237-42 in your application.