Senior Technical Artist

Job Description : Technical Artist

Department : Art

Reporting to : Technical Art Lead

The Studio

Compulsion Games is a first-party game studio and subsidiary of Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios, located in Montreal, Canada.

Founded by industry veterans, we have a human-first culture where we trust and respect each other, with shared love and passion for our craft. Our games have won praise and awards for their art, music, world-building, and engaging narratives. We are devoted to building experiences that feel unique and handcrafted, and our tech art team is here to make sure our content creators are as creative and well trained as they can be.

We aim to create characters with compelling, human flaws and narratives that explore heavy themes with care and empathy. Our storytelling typically has a healthy dose of darkness and comedy thrown in for good measure.

Our Culture

Compulsion Games is a quality-led studio with a humble team that enjoys experimenting with an artistic approach to making games. We like to hire people who are drawn to our core values of trust, autonomy, harmony and craftsmanship and share our vision of a studio built around them. As a team, we do not want to grow too big to stay true to these values, as they don’t scale well.

A core part of our hiring process is ensuring new hires are well-aligned to build a harmonious team and company. We care deeply about our team and their well-being, so you’d be joining a close-knit group who are creative, inclusive, and care about developing one another.

The Need

We’re looking to add a talented technical artist to our human-sized tech art community, to support and participate in various technical and art activities that will benefit the rest of the studio as well as our players. This includes building bridges between DCCs and the Engine, implementing some form of data validation, exploring the new workflows enabled by the latest version of Unreal, and implementing some optimisations.

The Role

We expect you to be passionate about solving technical and artistic problems, always trying to understand how things work under the hood and applying these learnings to the different challenges you and your team will face regularly. This includes optimisation and memory management, but also being there for our different art teams (Environment, characters, VFX, lighting) by giving advice and being approachable and supportive.

We’d like you to have some experience in the game industry, preferably working with PC and / or Console Games, but other relevant experiences will be taken into consideration. With this exposure, we expect you to understand the most common technical challenges as well as the life cycle of a successful project and how to adapt your team to each phase. True to our core values of trust and autonomy, we won't dictate your mandates but instead will empower you and your team to decide what needs to be done and how to get there. The Art Director and the Tech Director will be there to help you in this endeavor.

Specific Role Requirements

• You are a human-focused person. As a professional, you deeply care for your colleagues and are always here to help them. Being patient and adapting your speech to the technical level of your interlocutor is a must.
• Some experience working in Games. As a veteran, we will respect your hard-earned skills and will try our best to make sure you can use your strengths daily. We will adjust the title to your seniority.
• We value people with a deep knowledge in a specific domain just as well as people with a breadth of knowledge and can help on many fronts.
• Experience with Unreal Engine is preferable, if not showing that you can quickly ramp up because you have solved similarly problems to those we are facing is mandatory. You should have a passion for teaching and sharing your knowledge with others.
• Having experience with optimization (shaders, materials, data) is preferable.
• Having some experience with DCCs (Maya, Blender, Substance) and Profilers (Unreal Insight, Pix, renderdoc, etc) is a nice to have.
• You have a critical eye for art and you bring strong fundamental skills like color theory, timing, composition, balance, and secondary action. As such you have a good experience adapting to various tones and art styles.
• An in-depth understanding of workflows as they relate to different disciplines within the Art Department (Animation, Lighting, Characters, Environment, VFX).
• Being interested and playing games regularly is a benefit. (Understanding where the bar is, in terms of performance and quality in the industry.)
• You always want to learn more and improve regardless of your seniority. You are the one telling us what you will learn next, not the other way around.
• We expect excellent communications skills to collaborate effectively with a diverse group of artists, designers, and animators. It’s a very important part of the job as things often happen organically in our studio.
• We expect high levels of autonomy and proactivity as it would help you to thrive in our work culture.
• We would like you to be somebody who values maintainability as well as the ease of reading your technical work (code / node graphs) as it leads to better teamwork and collaboration within the discipline and beyond.

Please note that this is a Fixed-Term Contractor position, for 12 months initially, with the possibility of extension. Whilst weoperatea hybrid work environment, our preference is to hire applicants who can spend time in the studio regularly; therefore, we willprioritiseapplicants local to Montreal and / or within Quebec province.

Our downtown Montreal location, conveniently situated by the Atwater Metro station, operateson a hybrid setup for employees based in or willing torelocateto the Montreal area.

Ifyou’reeager to contribute to a team that’s redefining storytelling in games, we’dlove to hear from you.

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