Technical Art Lead (f/m/d)

As a Technical Art Lead, you are responsible for the technical art deliverables of a project, and for the way your team produces them. Tech Art at Aesir sits between Art and Tech and covers a wide surface: materials and shaders, animation systems, UI, VFX, audio integration, procedural content, and the tooling that keeps it maintainable. You lead a group of technical artists, VFX artists, animation artists and Unreal generalists.

You will work in Unreal Engine 5 on AA titles for PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, in project teams of up to around 70 people. You represent your team towards the Product Owner, the other leads, and towards clients, publishers and outsourcing partners.

You own the performance budget of the project's content. Every week you report frame rate, memory and load times per hardware target: three PC spec levels, plus performance and quality mode on console. You name the bottleneck. Where the visual target and the frame rate disagree, you make the call and you explain it. You are also responsible for architecture. Our productions run for years and ship on more than one platform, so a pipeline that needs a specialist every week does not hold.

This is a hands on lead role. Part of your week goes into the engine, on architecture decisions and on the hardest problems. The rest goes into your people: you are the line manager for around three to five technical artists, including their goals and their development, and on a project you take the operational lead for the technical art group. The aim is a team that works on its own and stands behind the decisions it makes together.

• Own the technical art deliverables of a project, and stand for them towards the Product Owner, the other leads and the client.
• Break complex systems down together with your seniors, into architecture and work packages that fit what the other departments need.
• Plan and prioritise your team's workload, and clear impediments before they turn into blockers.
• Set workflows, conventions and architecture standards, write them down, and make sure they are followed.
• Agree quality expectations with the Product Owner and the other leads, and hold your team's output to them.
• Own the performance budget: measure frame rate, memory and load times per platform, report them weekly with the bottleneck named, and decide where fidelity gives way to frame rate.
• Review your team's work, and give feedback that improves both the deliverable and the person.
• Stay hands on where it counts: architecture decisions, the hardest technical problems, and the work nobody else can pick up yet.
• Track where your team's skills do not yet cover what the project needs, and say what should happen about it: training, staffing, or a different plan.
• Spot risks early, in the production, in the team and in the deliverable, and act on them. Name the critical goals and the adjustable ones before a deadline forces the choice.
• Grow your people. You run their one to ones, agree their goals, and mentor on the technical and the personal side. Deliverables and architecture belong to the team rather than only to you.
• Steer outsourcing partners and agencies on technical art work, and drive cross-project topics: shared tooling, plugins and conventions that other Aesir projects build on.

Must-haves

• 6+ years of professional experience in game development.
• Expert-level Unreal Engine 5 knowledge across the technical art surface: materials and shaders including HLSL, UMG and Slate, the animation framework (Motion Matching, Animation Blueprints, Control Rig, Level Sequencer), editor tooling, content pipelines, procedural workflows (PCG, Houdini), and the engine's rendering and asset systems.
• Architecture and system design: you can structure a technical art stack that stays extensible and maintainable over a multi-year project, and you can break a complicated system into work other people can estimate.
• Performance and optimisation: profiling with Unreal Insights, RenderDoc and the platform tools, plus a repertoire of measures (instancing, LODs and HLODs, streaming, culling, texture compression, PSOs) and a clear view of what each one costs in look and in maintainability.
• Working knowledge of the neighbouring fields: rigging and animation, VFX, UI, audio integration, procedural generation. Enough to lead, review and staff them.
• You have led technical work for other people: delegating, planning a workload, and being accountable for output that is not only your own.
• Strong communication: in technical depth with engineers, and in plain language with art, design, production, clients and publishers.
• Perforce, review processes and CI or build pipelines as part of a real production workflow.
• An artistic eye, and a sense for pace and audio-visual impact.
• You stay calm under production pressure and delegate, instead of passing the pressure on unfiltered. You speak up when something is wrong, you challenge assumptions with respect, and you can reflect on your own effect on the team.
• You work in a way the team can copy: clean, documented, reusable. The team takes its cues from it.
• You want to make games, not just work in games. We will ask what you last built, broke or took apart. A side project, a shader experiment, a mod, a tool that saved you an hour. Size does not matter, the pull does.
• You learn continuously because you enjoy it. UE5 moves every few months, and the people who do well here find that interesting rather than exhausting.
• Confident English, spoken and written. It is our company and project language.
• Munich. That's where the team is and where we'd like you to be. We've made the occasional exception for someone exceptional. If you think that's you, make the case.

Never held the title, or a year or two short of the six? Apply anyway if you have been the person the team already asks. We would rather see how you think about a team and a production than count years.

Nice-to-haves

Nobody has all of these. They're here so you can see what we actually work with.

• Deep expertise in one of our high-priority areas: performance optimisation in Unreal, in-engine animation systems, UI implementation, or procedural generation.
• AngelScript. We run a custom engine branch with AngelScript alongside C++ and Blueprint, and a lot of our gameplay and tooling is written in it.
• You have led a technical art or tech team through a full production cycle.
• Experience with agile and with non-agile production, and a clear opinion on when to use which. Ours is adapted to how the studio actually works rather than textbook Scrum.
• Client or publisher facing work: milestone negotiation, feasibility discussions, scope trade-offs.
• Setting up and steering outsourcing partners for technical art or content work.
• Shipped or supported console and lower-spec targets (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck), including their certification and performance realities.
• Studio-level tooling or plugins used across several projects.
• German, or the motivation to learn it.

Where this role goes

The scope grows with you, from one project to standards, tooling and pipelines that several projects depend on. Which parts, and how fast, depends on you and on what the studio needs next.

• An inspiring and creative work environment
• A 38-hour workweek to ensure a healthy work-life balance.
• Relocation support to ensure a smooth start in Munich.
• Flexibility through remote work options tailored to project requirements.
• Free drinks (soft drinks, coffee, tea) and weekly fresh organic fruits.
• Monthly top-up of a company card worth €50, usable for various purchases*.
• Table tennis and foosball tables for relaxation after demanding tasks.
• Exciting company events that foster knowledge exchange and provide space for fun and recreation.
• Coverage of public transportation costs and meal subsidies*.

*After successful completion of the probation period.