Principal Technical Artist - Optimization

Job Description

Ubisoft Winnipeg is looking for a Principal Technical Artist, focused on Performance Optimization, to join our Technical Art team. As the Performance Senior Technical Artist, you will handle analyzing game content and levels from a performance standpoint and setting budgets, standards, and best practices for innovative, real-time projects resulting in the highest quality content that runs at target framerates on target hardware. 

We are looking for a highly talented, motivated, and experienced person to work with us on XDefiant, a new multiplatform online multiplayer action game. XDefiant is a free-to-play, fast-paced arena shooter that combines intense gunplay with personalized loadouts and specialized factions, as teams of gunfighters battle for domination.

Job Description

WHAT YOU'LL DO
• Create performance benchmark tests, analyze the resulting data, and provide actionable tasks to optimize content while maintaining visual quality.  
• Work closely with rendering engineers and quality assurance to monitor and debug performance-related bottlenecks and overages.
• Identify potential automation opportunities in our performance analysis pipeline.
• Plan, enact, and enforce the best practices for authoring optimized content given specific hardware targets.
• Provide disciplined performance budgets and content goalposts for our target hardware, software. 
• Write technical documentation clearly and precisely for different audiences.
• Maintain a clear & precise communication chain between all stakeholders (Artists and Programmers). 
• Drive the standardization of tools, workflows, project templates, and best practices in the realm of real-time optimization.  
• Assess, alter, and integrate assets (i.e., mesh, texture), optimizing memory footprints and/or decreasing performance cost.  
• Work closely with various art departments, guiding them through creating art assets optimized to our game engine.  
• Work with engine team to manage and improve our performance/optimization feature set. 
• Provide and maintain tools to empower artist-guided real-time performance monitoring, best practices, and transparency.

Qualifications

WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- 10 to 15 years' experience in video game production or equivilent
- Strong knowledge in Maya, 3DS Max or similar 3D program.  
- Experience creating performant game assets inside of a game engine. 
- Ability to grasp new programs and systems quickly.  
- Self-motivation and excellent problem-solving skills. 
- Effective communication and time management skills.  
- Ability to work with multiple development disciplines effectively. 
- Ability to work with both Artists and Programmers to achieve standards set by Directors. 
- Ability to debug non-performant game scenarios and art content in engine.
- Strong grasp of real-time rendering engines like Unreal Engine or Unity, their provided profiling tools, and their optimal configurations related to the performance needs of the target hardware, software, and distribution. 
- Working knowledge of real-time rendering pipelines and ability to troubleshoot and diagnose performance bottlenecks.
- Strong grasp of real-time content creation pipelines and the impact of well-authored assets on runtime performance.
- Working knowledge of content optimization techniques, strategies, and engine configurations. 
- A passion for creating efficient and stable workflows that allow artists to focus on content creation. 
- Ability to read/write HLSL/GLSL/Node Based Shader Graphs.
- Ability to profile Shaders, Materials and generic Art Assets.
- Experience using a profiler to pinpoint and optimize problems in game assets.
- Ability to explain the passes in a rendered frame.
- Understanding of how a pixel is being rendered on screen.
- Knowledge in at least 1 programming or scripting language (C#, Python, C/C++) .
- Experience developing and shipping a professional game project start to finish .

NICE TO HAVE
- Knowledge of software development tools, such as Visual Studio .
- Console development experience on any platform of Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo (handheld consoles) .
- Good knowledge of tool development, either using Python, C#, C++, or visual scripting tools like Unreal Engine Blueprints. 
- Experience using Houdini or other Procedural content pipelines. 

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r0qmo8-3-136-18-192-42 in your application.