Technical Artist - Lookdev (Contract Position)

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Blackbird Interactive is seeking a Lookdev focused Technical Artist for a contract role in Vancouver, with flexible remote options within Canada and hybrid arrangements. This position centers on real-time rendering, shaders, materials, lighting, and ensuring visual consistency while keeping content performant. You’ll partner with artists and engineers to prototype and maintain look development workflows, create and optimize real-time shaders, and document standards. To apply, foreground a portfolio of real-time lookdev work that demonstrates PBR pipelines, lighting setups, shader graphs or HLSL, and production-friendly tooling, plus collaboration across art and tech. Highlight Maya and texturing tools, familiarity with Unity or Unreal, and Perforce. Show measurable impact and case studies, and readiness for a four-day work week culture.

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Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects, which encompass world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres.
In 2022, we announced that our studio is implementing a four-day work week as well as supporting in-studio, remote within Canada, and hybrid work arrangements as permanent options to our employees.
Blackbird Interactive is looking for a passionate and experienced Lookdev-focused Technical Artist to join our team and help define the visual identity of our games. Do you love crafting materials, lighting, and rendering solutions that elevate art direction while working within real-time constraints? Are you excited by the intersection of art, technology, and visual problem-solving?
You will work closely with artists, art directors, and engineers to develop and maintain high-quality look development workflows. This role focuses on real-time rendering, shaders, materials, lighting, and visual consistency, helping teams achieve ambitious visual targets while keeping content performant and production-friendly.

Responsibilities

•  Partner with artists and art direction to define, prototype, and maintain the visual look of assets and environments in-engine.
• Develop and support real-time shaders, materials, and material workflows.
• Support lighting workflows, including setup, iteration, and optimization for real-time environments.
• Ensure visual consistency across assets, environments, and scenes through shared standards and tooling.
• Collaborate with engineering to communicate artistic needs and technical constraints related to rendering and lighting.
• Identify and resolve visual, rendering, or performance issues while maintaining artistic intent.
• Create and maintain documentation for lookdev standards, shader usage, and lighting workflows.
• Support artists with troubleshooting, iteration, and best practices for real-time rendering

Requirements

• Strong understanding of real-time rendering principles and game art pipelines.
• Experience developing or authoring shaders and materials for real-time engines.
• Solid artistic eye for lighting, color, composition, and surface response.
• Familiarity with physically based rendering (PBR) workflows.
• Experience working with lighting systems, post-processing, and rendering features in real-time engines.
• Some scripting or technical experience sufficient to prototype, debug, and support lookdev workflows,
• Experience working with DCC tools such as Maya and common texturing tools.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative, artist-first mindset

Pluses

•  Experience with shader graph tools and low-level shader languages (eg. HLSL)Experience with Unity, Unreal, or similar real-time engines.
• Knowledge of performance profiling and optimization related to lighting and materials.
• Experience supporting stylized or non-photoreal rendering styles.
• Familiarity with version control systems such as Perforce (P4V)