Lead Environment Artist
About the role
ABOUT YOU We are looking for a Lead Environmental Artist who combines a strong artistic eye with solid technical expertise. This role is not only about creating visually impressive environments — we need someone who understands how to build high-quality, optimized, production-ready environments that perform efficiently in a real-time game engine. ABOUT US Xsolla is a global commerce company with robust tools and services to help developers solve the inherent challenges of the video game industry. From indie to AAA, companies partner with Xsolla to help them fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Grounded in the belief in the future of video games, Xsolla is resolute in the mission to bring opportunities together, and continually make new resources available to creators. Headquartered and incorporated in Los Angeles, California, Xsolla operates as the merchant of record and has helped over 1,500+ game developers to reach more players and grow their businesses around the world. With more paths to profits and ways to win, developers have all the things needed to enjoy the game. For more information, visit xsolla.com.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead the creation of high-quality environments from concept through final implementation.
- Establish and maintain the visual quality bar for environments while ensuring technical and performance requirements are met.
- Create optimized environment assets, including modular kits, architecture, terrain, props, materials, and set dressing.
- Work closely with Technical Artists, Level Designers, Lighting Artists, and Engineers to balance visual quality with performance.
- Define and maintain environment art pipelines, workflows, and technical standards.
- Identify and resolve performance issues related to geometry, materials, textures, lighting, draw calls, memory usage, LODs, and asset complexity.
- Review and provide feedback on the work of Environment Artists and support their professional development.
- Collaborate with Art Direction to translate the artistic vision into scalable and technically achievable environments.
- Participate in profiling and optimization throughout production rather than treating optimization as a final-stage task.
REQUIREMENTS
- Strong professional experience as a Senior or Lead Environment Artist in game development.
- Excellent portfolio demonstrating visually compelling, production-ready environments.
- Strong understanding of real-time optimization and the ability to make informed trade-offs between visual fidelity and performance.
- Advanced knowledge of environment production pipelines, modular workflows, LODs, materials, shaders, texture optimization, and asset budgets.
- Strong proficiency with industry-standard 3D tools and experience working in Unreal Engine and/or Unity.
- Good understanding of lighting, composition, scale, color, and environmental storytelling.
- Ability to profile environments, identify technical bottlenecks, and collaborate with technical teams to resolve them.
- Leadership and mentoring experience, with the ability to provide clear and constructive artistic and technical feedback.
- Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.