Principal Technical Artist, Games R&D - Tech Lab

At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.

The Game Studio Tech Lab team is a small, dynamic team. We build focused, creative games to validate and steer Netflix's emerging technology investments that will make Netflix an amazing destination for games of all kinds. These unique projects will be a mix of demonstrating and inspiring what's possible with these new technologies and services while working directly with partner teams to help ensure an excellent developer experience that enables developers to focus on the fun.

The R&D Team Games Principal Technical Artist will be on a small, senior-leaning team of multi-talented game engineers, designers and artists. This is a jack-of-all-trades Principal technical artist role with a creative and artistic focus, balanced by deep expertise in performance and technical optimization. This team will make smaller, experimental games with opportunities to work with and steer emerging new technologies — often on constrained, early, or unproven platforms where optimization is critical to proving what's possible.

Responsibilities

• Performance and technical optimization: Drive runtime and memory performance across CPU, GPU, and bandwidth budgets. Profile, diagnose, and resolve bottlenecks in rendering, shaders, animation, asset streaming, and content pipelines. Establish budgets, benchmarks, and best practices that make our games run beautifully on emerging and constrained platforms.

• Visual development and prototyping: Identify and prototype new opportunities to incorporate technology and unlock new creative opportunities. Comfortable with shifting or in-progress technologies and platforms, and distilling art-related technical constraints and opportunities from them, and their ramifications on pipeline, performance, and visual assets.

• Games development and prototyping: Make fun, interactive game experiences of a variety of types across a variety of technologies (potentially including different engines), in a fast-paced, iterative environment — with a constant eye toward what will and won't hold up under real performance constraints.

• Pipeline and tooling: Architect and maintain art pipelines, tools, and automation that keep content optimized by default and allow a small team to punch well above its weight.

• Creative/Artistic: Create game assets — textures, models, shaders, and effects — that can ship in a real game with a high degree of technical capability and optimization.

Requirements

• 10+ years experience as a technical artist shipping multiple AAA, casual, or mobile games, with a track record of senior-level technical leadership

• Deep expertise in performance optimization across rendering, shaders, memory, draw calls, overdraw, LODs, texture/mesh budgets, and asset pipelines

• Fluency with profiling and debugging tools (e.g., RenderDoc, PIX, Nsight, Xcode/Instruments, Unity Profiler, Unreal Insights) and the ability to read GPU captures and frame timings to drive concrete improvements

• Strong art skills with experience and a deep understanding of topics such as 3D graphics, VFX, modeling, shaders, texturing, and lighting for games

• Demonstrated experience building games for early, unfinished, or heavily constrained platforms where optimization directly enables the creative vision

• Exceptional communication and cross-discipline collaboration skills, including the ability to mentor engineers and artists on performance-minded content authoring

• Deep familiarity with multiple game engine technologies such as Unity3D and Unreal Engine, including their rendering pipelines and performance characteristics

• Expertise in content creation and tool development in DCC tools, such as Maya, Photoshop, Substance, Houdini, etc.

• Passion for making video games, especially in a rapid, focused, smaller form vs. multi-year investments

Bonus Skills

• Strong coding/scripting expertise, such as C#, Lua, Python, C++, etc., with the ability to write and optimize shaders (HLSL/GLSL/ShaderLab) and engine-side tooling

• Experience writing or heavily modifying custom render features, post-process effects, or compute shaders