Lighting Artist - GameSim - Talent Pipeline

GameSim is a game development studio that partners with clients to build games across PC/console and a range of art styles. They care about craftsmanship, collaboration, and shipping work they’re proud to put their names on.

The role: GameSim is seeking a Lighting Artist to create high-quality real-time lighting and help support the execution of lighting work across GameSim projects. This is a hands-on production role with opportunities to take on project-level leadership responsibilities.

Responsibilities:

Lighting Creation and Execution

• Create high-quality real-time lighting for gameplay environments, levels, cinematics, characters, and interactive sequences.
• Translate art direction, concept art, reference material, gameplay requirements, narrative goals, and client feedback into effective lighting solutions.
• Use lighting to establish mood, atmosphere, visual hierarchy, environmental storytelling, and player focus.
• Ensure lighting supports gameplay readability, navigation, combat visibility, character presentation, and important interactive elements.
• Develop and refine exposure, color, contrast, fog, atmosphere, reflections, shadows, emissive response, color grading, and post-processing.
• Create lighting for a range of visual styles, including realistic, stylized, cinematic, and highly art-directed projects.
• Maintain visual consistency across related environments, gameplay spaces, sequences, times of day, and lighting conditions.
• Bring assigned scenes from initial lighting setup through final polish.
• Respond to feedback from Art Direction, project leadership, and clients in a timely and professional manner.
• Ensure completed work meets project requirements for quality, performance, organization, and delivery.

Leadership and Quality Support

• Help oversee lighting work for an assigned scene, group of scenes, feature, or milestone when requested by project leadership.
• Review the work of other lighting artists or multidisciplinary artists contributing to lighting.
• Provide clear, respectful, and actionable feedback through written notes, live reviews, reference images, paintovers, or in-engine examples.
• Help ensure lighting work follows approved visual targets, technical standards, and project requirements.
• Communicate expected outcomes, priorities, and quality standards to artists working within an assigned area.
• Monitor the visual progress of assigned lighting work and identify scenes that may require additional revision or support.
• Confirm that feedback has been addressed before work is submitted for senior, Art Director, or client review.
• Support junior or less-experienced artists with lighting fundamentals, engine workflows, scene organization, optimization, and production practices.
• Lead by example through reliable execution, clear communication, constructive collaboration, and professional conduct.
• Escalate unresolved quality, schedule, scope, or technical concerns to the appropriate senior artist, Art Director, or Producer.

Planning and Production Support

• Work with Art Direction and Production to understand lighting priorities, tasks, estimates, and milestone expectations.
• Help break lighting goals into clear and manageable production tasks.
• Provide progress updates and communicate when assigned work is at risk of missing quality, technical, or scheduling requirements.
• Participate in daily reviews, art reviews, milestone evaluations, and planning discussions.
• Help prepare lighting work for internal reviews, client presentations, milestone submissions, and final delivery.
• Balance hands-on production responsibilities with review, coordination, troubleshooting, and team support.
• Adjust priorities when creative direction, technical requirements, production scope, or client feedback changes.
• Maintain accurate task status and documentation using the project’s production-management tools.

Technical and Pipeline Responsibilities

• Work with Technical Art and Engineering to ensure lighting is visually effective, technically stable, and appropriate for the target platform.
• Follow established budgets for dynamic lights, shadows, volumetrics, reflections, global illumination, memory, and scalability.
• Identify and help resolve issues involving exposure, shadow artifacts, light leaking, reflections, volumetrics, bake quality, material response, and post-processing.
• Use dynamic, baked, stationary, or hybrid lighting approaches according to the project’s established pipeline.
• Profile assigned lighting work and make informed visual adjustments to meet performance requirements.
• Validate lighting across relevant gameplay cameras, display settings, hardware targets, times of day, weather states, and scalability levels.
• Follow project standards for scene organization, naming conventions, source control, documentation, and asset integration.
• Contribute to reusable lighting setups, templates, documentation, validation processes, and team best practices.
• Identify workflow problems and communicate potential improvements to senior artists, Technical Art, or project leadership.

Cross-Discipline Collaboration

• Collaborate with Environment Art to ensure geometry, materials, composition, and set dressing support the intended lighting.
• Partner with VFX to integrate fog, particles, weather, fire, emissive effects, and atmospheric elements.
• Work with Design to ensure lighting supports navigation, player guidance, combat readability, objectives, and interactive systems.
• Coordinate with Character Art and Animation to maintain readable and appealing character presentation.
• Support cinematic lighting needs involving shot composition, continuity, exposure, character lighting, and narrative focus.
• Communicate artistic and technical concerns clearly to both creative and non-creative stakeholders.
• Work effectively with distributed teams, partner studios, external vendors, and clients across different time zones.

Requirements:

• Professional experience creating lighting for games, real-time projects, animation, visualization, or a closely related field.
• A portfolio or reel demonstrating strong real-time lighting work.
• Strong understanding of lighting fundamentals, including value, color, contrast, composition, visual hierarchy, atmosphere, exposure, shadow, and material response.
• Experience lighting gameplay environments or interactive real-time scenes.
• Understanding of how lighting supports mood, gameplay readability, navigation, environmental storytelling, and player focus.
• Professional experience using Unreal Engine or another modern real-time engine.
• Experience with dynamic or baked lighting, global illumination, reflections, volumetrics, exposure, color grading, and post-processing.
• Working knowledge of physically based rendering and material response.
• Understanding of basic lighting optimization, including light cost, shadows, volumetrics, reflections, scalability, and platform constraints.
• Ability to take ownership of assigned scenes and follow them through review and completion.
• Ability to receive, interpret, and implement artistic and technical feedback.
• Experience reviewing artwork or providing constructive feedback to teammates.
• Ability to identify work that does not meet an established quality target and communicate practical improvements.
• Ability to balance visual quality, technical requirements, production scope, and schedule.
• Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills.
• Ability to organize priorities, communicate risks, and follow work through to completion.
• Experience collaborating with multiple game-development disciplines.
• Ability to adapt to different projects, visual styles, engines, pipelines, platforms, and client expectations.
• Ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a distributed team.