Entry Level Video Game Artist Jobs in California

Job Type: Full-Time

Location: Remote - Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming   (Los Angeles area preferred)

Snail Games strives to create the new high bar for gameplay experience in online gaming. We have been a global developer and publisher of digital entertainment since 2009 and are committed to pushing the boundaries of the industry.

Snail Games USA is seeking a Senior Technical Artist to join our Art Center and provide hands-on technical art support across multiple Unreal Engine projects.

This is a broad production-focused Technical Artist role working between art and engineering to solve technical problems, improve workflows, and help teams deliver high-quality game content efficiently. The role will have a particular emphasis on Unreal Engine rendering, materials, and shaders, but responsibilities may shift based on project and production needs.

The ideal candidate has strong technical-art fundamentals and enough breadth to work across asset integration, optimization, tooling, pipelines, troubleshooting, and visual systems. They should be comfortable investigating ambiguous problems, collaborating directly with artists and engineers, and carrying solutions through implementation and validation.

• Provide hands-on technical art support across a range of game development and production needs.

• Develop, maintain, and optimize Unreal Engine materials, shaders, and rendering workflows.

• Investigate and resolve visual, technical, performance, and asset integration problems.

• Integrate art assets and ensure they meet visual, technical, and runtime requirements.

• Profile and optimize content for rendering performance, memory use, shader complexity, and scalability.

• Establish and maintain practical standards for assets, materials, textures, meshes, LODs, collision, naming, and project organization.

• Develop or improve tools and workflows that increase artist efficiency and reduce repetitive production work.

• Support artists with technical setup, debugging, implementation, and optimization.

• Work with Art, Engineering, Design, Animation, Lighting, and other disciplines to solve cross-discipline production problems.

• Evaluate workflows and identify technical risks or production bottlenecks before they become larger problems.

• Review assets and implementation for technical quality, consistency, and performance.

• Create documentation, examples, and reusable best practices for distributed development teams.

• Adapt to different technical-art needs as project priorities and production requirements change.

• Take ownership of technical-art problems from investigation through implementation, testing, and validation.

• Professional Technical Artist experience in game development.

• Strong Unreal Engine experience, preferably UE5.

• Strong general knowledge of real-time game art pipelines and technical-art production.

• Strong experience with Unreal materials, shaders, rendering, or related visual systems.

• Understanding of real-time rendering, profiling, optimization, and performance constraints.

• Experience with game asset pipelines including meshes, textures, materials, LODs, collision, and asset organization.

• Experience integrating and troubleshooting production assets in-engine.

• Demonstrated ability to solve problems spanning both artistic and technical concerns.

• Ability to independently investigate unfamiliar problems and develop practical production solutions.

• Strong communication skills and experience collaborating directly with artists and engineers.

• Ability to balance visual quality, production efficiency, technical constraints, and runtime performance.

• Python scripting or pipeline automation experience.

• Unreal Blueprint experience.

• HLSL or custom shader development experience.

• Experience with procedural tools such as Houdini.

• Experience with environment, character, vegetation, VFX, lighting, or procedural content pipelines.

• Experience building reusable tools or workflows for artists.

• Experience with DCC pipeline integration such as Maya, Blender, Substance, or similar tools.

• Experience shipping PC or console titles using Unreal Engine.

• Experience supporting multiple projects or production teams.

100,000-130,000 annually

Compensation within the range will depend on experience, technical breadth, demonstrated production ownership, and location.

• True focus on work/life balance

• Paid company holidays, vacation, and separate sick leave

• Medical, dental, vision, and Life/LTD

• 401k with company match

As part of the Company's activities in video game development, publishing, and short-form video content creation, certain projects, discussions, or creative materials may include themes, visuals, language, or subject matter that some individuals could find mature, violent, sexual, graphic, or otherwise sensitive in nature ("Mature Content").

Examples may include, but are not limited to, depictions or descriptions of combat, violence, adult themes or relationships, suggestive or satirical humor, or strong language. Employees are expected to engage with such material in a professional and creative context as part of their job duties.