Senior Technical Material/Shader Artist

Lighthouse Games is a new AAA studio in Leamington Spa. We are defined by our pedigree of talent and serious ambition to build a new best-in-class game. When you join us at Lighthouse, you’ll create the best work of your career within a collaborative, hybrid working environment. You’ll learn from the best and work alongside the future greats of the gaming industry.

As a Senior Technical Material/Shader Artist, you will play an important role in developing the materials, shaders and technical workflows that support our Vehicle Art team. Combining a strong artistic eye with technical expertise, you will work closely with Vehicle Artists, Art Leadership, Technical Artists and Render Engineers to create scalable material solutions and push the visual quality of our ground-breaking new IP.

You will develop sophisticated shaders and material workflows that enable artists to create highly believable, visually compelling content while meeting the performance requirements of a real-time AAA production. As a senior member of the team, you will take ownership of complex artistic and technical challenges, contribute to best practices and share your knowledge with other artists.

Key duties

• Create high-quality, technically efficient materials and shaders that support the visual ambitions of the Vehicle Art team.
• Design, develop and maintain Unreal Engine Master Materials, shader systems and reusable material functions for a wide range of vehicle content.
• Produce benchmark-quality PBR materials and Material Instances that combine convincing visual results with efficient real-time implementation.
• Collaborate with Vehicle Artists, Technical Artists and Render Engineers to develop material solutions that balance realism, flexibility, usability and performance.
• Contribute to the development and documentation of scalable material pipelines, workflows and artist-friendly tools.
• Profile, debug and optimise shader content, helping resolve rendering issues and ensuring materials operate within performance and memory targets.

Requirements

• Strong professional experience developing, implementing and optimising real-time materials and shaders within Unreal Engine.
• Advanced knowledge of Unreal Engine’s Material Editor, including Master Materials, material functions, parameterisation and reusable shader systems.
• Strong understanding of real-time rendering, PBR workflows, lighting, texture authoring and shader-performance considerations.
• Proficiency with material creation tools such as Substance Designer and Substance Painter, supported by a strong portfolio demonstrating artistic quality and technical material knowledge.
• Experience investigating and resolving shader, rendering and material-pipeline problems in collaboration with artists and engineers.

Desirable

• Experience using HLSL, custom shader code, procedural material techniques or other scripting and automation technologies.
• Experience creating photorealistic hard-surface materials for vehicles, machinery, products or similarly complex assets.
• Knowledge of photogrammetry, photography, scanning, physically accurate material capture or automotive visualisation.

Benefits

• 25 Days Holiday, plus 1 day for your birthday
• Studio Shutdown between Christmas and New Year
• Discretionary Bonus Scheme
• Private Pension Scheme
• Private Healthcare
• Health and Well-Being Benefits
• Dental Care
• Optical treatments
• Mental Health Support