Rendering Technical Artist - Unpublished R&D Product

Riot Games was established in 2006 by entrepreneurial gamers who believe that player-focused game development can result in great games. In 2009, Riot released its debut title League of Legends to critical and player acclaim. As the most played video game in the world, over 100 million play every month. Players form the foundation of our community and it’s for them that we continue to evolve and improve the League of Legends experience.

We’re looking for humble but ambitious, razor-sharp professionals who can teach us a thing or two. We promise to return the favor. Like us, you take play seriously; you’re passionate about games. We embrace those who see things differently, aren’t afraid to experiment, and who have a healthy disregard for constraints.

That's where you come in.

About the Role

As a Senior Technical Artist, Rendering on the Unpublished R&D Product team, you will translate creative direction into scalable, performant real-time rendering solutions. You will work across materials, shaders, lighting, and rendering systems in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), partnering with engineering, art, and design teams to address visual and technical challenges. You will help improve rendering workflows, establish technical standards, and support consistent visual quality across hardware platforms.

You will report into the Tech Lead of the team.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and implement rendering solutions that support visual direction and maintain consistency across platforms.
• Create, maintain, and optimize UE5 materials, shaders, and related rendering content.
• Partner with rendering engineers, artists, and designers to deliver rendering solutions within established performance budgets.
• Define rendering scalability settings, quality tiers, and fallback strategies for different hardware configurations.
• Profile and optimize shader performance, GPU workloads, memory utilization, and asset loading.
• Improve rendering workflows, technical standards, production tools, and documentation to support efficient content creation.
• Provide technical guidance to artists, resolve complex rendering challenges, and promote consistent rendering practices across the team.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional experience in technical art, real-time graphics, or related game development disciplines, including 4+ years working with Unreal Engine.
• Experience contributing rendering or technical art solutions to a shipped or long-running production project.
• Proficiency with UE5 material systems, shaders, and real-time rendering workflows, including the ability to read and write HLSL.
• Strong understanding of real-time rendering principles, lighting, material behavior, and content production workflows.
• Experience translating visual direction into technical rendering implementations involving materials, lighting, post-processing, or visual composition.
• Experience using profiling and performance analysis tools to identify and resolve GPU, shader, memory, and rendering performance issues across hardware configurations.
• Experience documenting technical solutions and collaborating with artists and engineers to balance visual quality, performance, and maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience adapting rendering solutions across multiple platforms, including quality tiers, feature fallbacks, and performance optimization strategies.
• Experience developing stylized rendering solutions or rendering systems for characters, environments, visual effects, vegetation, or related visual content.
• Experience establishing asset standards, rendering guidelines, technical documentation, or performance budget frameworks.
• Experience implementing and optimizing advanced UE5 rendering features, including Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps.

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this could be your role!