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Art Director, External Development

The Art Director, External Development is a creative role that will work with both internal and external teams to achieve visual excellence for the content and experiences that we create for our games.

They will provide support and direction and partner with AD’s, team leads and TA’s as well as the global domain leads, to push quality and innovation and drive process, tools, and training for our external development partners.

EA expects and needs our external partners to be able to achieve the same quality as our internal teams. It’s the role of this Art Director to understand and help establish the internal quality bar, and then drive and ensure that the external partner can deliver the desired results.

The Role:

• Demonstrate mastery of core craft skills in several major areas within external development art production
• Operate largely self-directed with just high-level direction
• Drive innovation and proactively undertake initiatives concerning quality, efficiency or techniques in external art production
• Ability to break down large scale problems, e.g., content for entire section of game, and execute against them
• Contribute to art direction within domain and ability to direct execution of assets
• Able to effectively advise on roadmaps, production ramps and overall production strategy
• Drive external development best practices and workflows
• Maintain visual and technical consistency and keep on track
• Create and critique briefs and production packs for external development
• Identify areas of development required for our partner teams and devise training packages or provide mentorship where applicable
• Understand external development risks or requirements and communicate effectively on behalf of the partner teams to internal stakeholders
• Demonstrate ability to analyze risks and provide solutions that consider all project constraints
• Advise on external team structure internally and externally
• Mentor and train team-wide, including rolling out workflows / techniques, and onboarding internally and externally
• Able to make effective decisions, communicate and advise, at all levels and across disciplines
• Effectively evaluate partner strengths and weaknesses and advice on new external development partnerships

Skills:

• Portfolio demonstrating capability to make solid art choices
• Prior game industry experience in an art outsourcing role
• Proven production experience owning entire levels and full game components from concept to finaling
• Good knowledge of Maya, Max, or similar 3D modeling software
• Experience in game production design process and methodology
• Experience in models and textures and implementation of approved assets into the game engine
• Experience leading cross-functional teams
• Ability to context switch between titles, products, and art styles
• Knowledge and ability to partner, mentor, coach and lead and adapt role based on audience.
• Ability to contribute to performance management of vendors and external partners by providing craft specific feedback
• Identify skills gaps and training opportunities for external partners

Location preference is close to a major EA production location for occasional facetime with game teams. Possible locations include:

• Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• San Francisco, California, USA
• Seattle, Washington, USA
• Orlando, Florida, USA
• Guildford, United Kingdom
• Stockholm, Sweden