Job Description:
Your Platform
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area and Melbourne, Australia – we’re the videogame development team behind Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty®: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty®: WWII. Since our founding in 2009, our greatest passion has been making AAA games. The strength of our team makes us not only excellent at what we do, but also how we do it. We firmly believe in supporting our talented employees to be the best they can be. Here at Sledgehammer Games, everyone is a game maker.
As we head into decade II of development, we’re focused on constantly evolving, innovating and taking risks – which are some of the most rewarding aspects of game development. With world-class audio, design, engineering and art teams, we’ve been able to achieve some of the highest-quality game execution of any studio in the industry. We love what we do and work hard to make sure that each new game we make is even better than the last. Creativity is key, and we’re looking for talented game developers for our exciting next project.
Sledgehammer Games is wholly owned by Activision.
Your Mission
As a Technical Artist you will work as part of our cross-trained tech art team to build, deliver and support art tools, workflows and assets that enable artists and designers to quickly integrate quality content and features into our games. A Technical Artist should have a strong eye for art quality and knowledge of real-time graphics pipelines. He or she will act as a bridge between art and engineering demonstrating superior communication skills to facilitate problem solving between departments. This candidate will be a technical resource for all phases of production while continually improving our content pipeline. Ideal candidates should be able to apply their ideas, techniques and experience using the latest technologies to create world-class game content. Experience and creativity in the art and science of rigging, animation, automation, and proceduralism are important for this role.
Priorities can often change in a fast-paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:
- Collaborate across disciplines to improve studio tools and pipelines
- Generate rigged assets, iterating with animators and engineers on fixes, improvements and alterations as the assets are applied to the game
- Proactively identify problems, propose solutions and work fluidly with other team members
- Push the graphical limitations of our engine, maintain frame rate requirements, and deliver content within memory and disk footprint budgets
- Create tools and processes that facilitate content authoring with an emphasis on user experience, quality and productivity
Player Profile
Minimum Requirements:
- Understanding of one or more commercially available real-time engines
- Experience in the following domains: game export frameworks, asset pipeline, and workflow design
- Familiarity with Maya, its API, and other industry leading applications
- Experience with art tool deployment strategy
- Ability to trouble shoot problems and support artists in getting their work done
- Excellent communication skills, especially with regards to illustrating technical processes
- Facility with modern scripting languages
Extra Points:
- If you are a tenacious, resourceful, tech savvy person with a willingness to grow, we want to hear from you regardless of your qualifications
- C++, Python, C# experience
- Experience with continuous-delivery graphics pipelines
- Examples of professional work (e.g. art, scripts, tools, simulations, etc.)
- Understanding of coding best practices and efficiency
- Has trained or mentored others
Our World
Activision Blizzard, Inc. (NASDAQ: ATVI), is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, Candy Crush™ and Bubble Witch™. Our combined entertainment network delights hundreds of millions of monthly active users in 196 countries, making us the largest gaming network on the planet!
Our ability to build immersive and innovate worlds is only enhanced by diverse teams working in an inclusive environment. We aspire to have a culture where everyone can thrive in order to connect and engage the world through epic entertainment. We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered!
The videogame industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners.
Sledgehammer Games is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable law and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.
