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Senior Shader and Materials Tech Artist

Crystal Dynamics , a part of the Square Enix family and the studio behind Marvel’s Avengers and the award-winning Tomb Raider game franchise, is constantly on the hunt for top-tier gaming talent worldwide. We pride ourselves on attracting and developing the best talent available to concept, create, and contribute to the most exciting projects in gaming. Our 30 years of game development experience, as well as our combined AAA games industry pedigree, has established us as one of best studios to work for today.

Benefits for this full-time position include a competitive salary, 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance options and plenty of days of paid time-off.

Position Summary

Come be a Part of the Future of Tomb Raider!

Position Summary

Crystal Dynamics is looking for a Shader / Materials Technical Artist who has an eye for high-quality, “best in class” material creation for real-time PBR environments. This Materials TA will be working on a small but fiercely talented team to bring to life the key moments in our narrative stories, levels and experiences. The successful candidate will be able to create complex, highly-optimized node-based shader networks, and work closely with artists to ensure derived materials instances are intuitive to work with.

Essential Duties

• Create a collection of parent / base materials from which the environment, character, and VFX teams will derive their material instances

• Develop workflows and pipelines to support the efficient creation of textures and material instances by the content team
• Work closely with Engineering, Art, and Technical Art to drive new technical features and improvements to visual fidelity, helping to realize the Art Director’s artistic vision for the game
• Set standards for material instance creation, including PBR value compliance and optimization best practices. Guide artists in proper creation of layered materials and help troubleshoot any issues. Document workflows and best practices for material creation
• Use debugging and profiling tools to solve technical material bugs, analyze materials for GPU performance, and manage memory usage

Essential Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in the game development industry on AAA console titles (or relevant industry) with at least one shipped title (or relevant projects)
• Experience writing shaders, either using a node-based graph or writing HLSL directly, including knowledge of best practices for GPU performance
• Expert knowledge of PBR, advanced rendering techniques, shading models, and the relationship between materials and lighting
• Significant optimization and debugging experience with PIX, GPAD, Nsight , RenderDoc , and/or similar profiling software for both GPU and CPU
• Able to take on R&D tasks and produce usable new features within time constraints

• Highly self-motivated, exceptional problem-solving ability, and works efficiently and independently. Strong organizational and time management skills, focusing on priorities and solving problems in a timely manner
• Positive and respectful attitude, strong work ethic, and able to work both independently and as part of a highly collaborative team – including in a remote environment. Open to mentoring more junior Technical Artists
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences, including productive feedback and brainstorming, creation / contribution to technical design documents, code documentation, and user documentation. Able to effectively communicate and escalate emergent issues to leadership

Desirable Skills

• Sound artistic judgment (composition, color, etc.) and an eye for quality

• Experience creating materials with Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Photoshop
• Understanding of photogrammetry and scanning processes
• Basic Python and/or C++ knowledge or willingness to learn

Portfolio Requirements

A portfolio submission is required for this position. Considered portfolios should include the following:

• A demo reel (approximately two minutes) showcasing best work from professional and personal projects.
• A breakdown of work done for each project presented in the demo reel, including a description of the original problem, an overview of the solution as well as technical details, explanation of contributions you were directly responsible for, and thoughts on shortcomings and possible future improvements.
• Source code, if you are able to share it! Ideally, provide a link to your github account.

We are committed to identifying and implementing positive and persistent measures to ensure equal opportunity in the recruitment, hiring, development, training, promotion and compensation of a diverse team employee group. This includes persons of different race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity or gender expression, pregnancy, breastfeeding or medical conditions related to breastfeeding, genetic characteristic, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, medical condition, political affiliation, age, veteran status, uniform service member status, marital status, physical or mental disability, or citizenship, as well as any other classifications protected by applicable federal,
state or local laws.