Lead Lighting Artist

For more than fifteen years we have entertained millions of players around the world with our award-winning games. Our accomplished people have expressed their passion for outstanding game feel, AAA audiovisual quality and technical innovation in the Burnout and Need for Speed series.

We believe that healthy, engaged teams make great games, so we place enormous value on collaboration, fresh ideas, and unique perspectives. We would love to hear yours! Crunch does not help make a better game. We do not do it.

What a Lead Lighting Artist does at Criterion:

We’re looking for a Lighting Artist who can combine a creative eye for composition and tone with a technical knowledge of realtime lighting and capture. We need your passion for visuals, atmosphere and style to influence in-game and cinematic lighting, and to set direction for your lighting team to help them achieve beautiful, engaging results that elevate the player experience.

You will provide creative and technical solutions together with your team, to add visual quality to the game whilst keeping in mind technical performance limits.

You will report to the Art Director as part of a team that works collaboratively in an iterative process; including sharing updates, communicating across departments and planning for your team with the help of Development Directors. You will also work with multiple other departments and studios to collaborate with other crafts across the project.

A Lead Lighting Artist also needs:

• Excellent knowledge of lighting, shading and PBR for realtime applications, including optimisation for performance and quality (e.g. experience using UE4/5, Frostbite, Unity, and other game engines).
• Experience shipping AAA titles on current gen5 consoles.
• Experience with reference capture for Lighting, including HDRI capture and calibration workflows and authoring of skydomes.
• Knowledge of colour grading approaches (e.g. DaVinci Resolve).
• Experience leading a small team or an appetite to learn this.
• A passion for the technical side of realtime lighting.
• A broad interest in aspects of visual art including video games (e.g. photography, filmography, painting, etc.).
• Knowledge of image editing or mastering software a bonus (e.g. Phothoshop, Nuke, etc.).

You’ll be expected to:

• Provide direction and guidance to our lighting teams across levels and cinematics, to enable them to deliver high-quality lighting on time and to specification
• Help support other leads within the franchise to consider mission-critical lighting needs.
• Collaborate with other leads in the franchise to ensure pipelines and workflows are up to production standards.
• Specify and work along with engine, graphics and tools teams to design and implement workflows, techniques and approaches to the lighting craft and set visual goals.
• Provide guidance to other team members to work through technical and creative solutions.
• Communicate progress and raise any issues or proposed solutions with the art directors on the team.
• Support the lighting team in providing guidance to the team, developing, mentoring, and enhancing internal capabilities.