ILM Immersive Senior Technical Artist, Performance

ILM Immersive, Lucasfilm’s award-winning storytelling studio, is looking for a Senior Technical Artist, focused on Performance Optimization, to join our Technical Art team. As the Performance Senior Technical Artist at ILM Immersive, you will be responsible for 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.

What You’ll Do

• Plans and enacts the best practices for studio real-time content authoring given specific hardware targets
• Plans and aids real-time projects in providing discipline performance budgets and content targets specific to target hardware, software
• Designs, implements and maintains methods of performance profiling for productions, clearly documenting diagnostics and proposed solutions
• Provides, educates, implements and maintains tooling and systems to empower artist driven real-time performance monitoring, best practices, and transparency
• Works closely with production leadership to help define a technical implementation plan, vision clarity, strategy, and risk management for a successful project foundation
• Helps to ensure consistent performance monitoring and notifications throughout a project through use of supported QA diagnostics, automated performance monitoring systems, and internal investigations and profiling
• Ensures studio projects close within the outlined performance specs aiding in techniques that maximize experience quality and fidelity
• Advises performance and optimization strategy as well as risk mitigation for future projects
• Drives the strategy to determine potential automation in our content pipeline that encourages and enforces defined standards, without compromising visual fidelity
• Drives the standardization of tools, workflows, project templates, and best practices in the realm of real-time optimization
• Contributes to the studio direction for proprietary performance profiling instrumentation and test frameworks
• Provide support for content creators and assist with technical issues, system use and raise any usability issues or bugs
• Advises, supports and contributes with internal ILM Immersive productions and other ILM real-time departments when the need arises
• Works closely with rendering engineers and quality assurance to debug performance related bottlenecks and overages as well as investigate, configure, design, and implement project optimization features and configurations

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in game development, film, or interactive media
• Experience developing and shipping a real-time project end to end be it games, immersive experiences, film, commercials or television
• Strong grasp of real-time content creation pipelines and the impact of well authored assets on runtime performance
• 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 pipelines and be able to troubleshoot and diagnose performance bottlenecks
• Good knowledge of content optimization techniques, strategies, and engine configurations.
• Good knowledge of source control systems such as Perforce
• Good knowledge of tool development either using Python, C#, C++, or visual scripting tools like Unreal Engine Blueprints
• Knowledge of software development tools such as visual studio
• Self-motivated individual with excellent problem solving skills.
• Flexibility to handle a variety of tasks.
• A passion for real-time graphics and its potential for VR, AR and immersive entertainment
• A passion for creating efficient and stable workflows that allow artists to focus on content creation
• Excellent communication skills, able to work as part of a team
• Ability and willingness to communicate cross-discipline and provide innovative solutions to production pipeline problems

**A portfolio / reel submission - including a detailed breakdown of your work in each section - is required with all applications**

The hiring range for this position in California is $127,100 to $158,900 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A bonus and/or long-term incentive units may be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to the full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.