Technical Artist - VR/Unity

Role Summary

Gym Class (GC) is the #1 most played sports game in virtual reality, and #1 best rated game on the Meta Quest platform. Millions of players around the world have downloaded GC to play basketball, make friends, break a sweat, and become a superstar.

As the team’s first Technical Artist hire, you’ll be bringing digital art to life in virtual reality. You’ll collaborate with our co-founders, artists, animators, backend and Unity engineers, and web designers across a wide variety of features.

The company is backed by top technology and sports investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator (YC), National Basketball Association (NBA), the Golden State Warriors, Soma Capital, and top player-investors like Kevin Durant, Danny Green, Zaza Pachulia, Andre Iguodala, and Lonzo Ball.

Join Gym Class if you’d like to work at the frontier of social gaming and virtual reality, love to ship great work that has a direct impact on a product and company, get rapid feedback from a hungry community of players, and grow your career along with a fast-growing team.

Responsibilities

• Products: Has shipped work as a Technical Artist on high quality games and/or VR experiences with a large consumer base.
• Collaboration: Functions as the bridge between artists and programmers on the development team through providing solutions for both technical and artistic requirements. Informs the artists, engineers, and product leads of any limitations and opportunities surrounding the target hardware and software (VR/MR devices and Unity). Collaborates with stakeholders to develop task lists to ensure assignments are progressing in alignment with schedules, milestones, roadmaps, and individual project goals.
• Tooling + Problem Solving: Create tools to speed up artist pipelines. Rapidly prototype features in Unity and provide results to key stakeholders and teammates for feature planning.
• Art + UX: Create textures, materials, shaders, character rigs, animations, Unity FX, and look development. Work with animators and animations to integrate them seamlessly into environments. Manage draw-calls, batching, texture memory, and GPU and CPU limitations. Create high quality stills and assets to be used in marketing, content drops, in-game UI, and video edits. Manage the look development for mobile handheld, portable VR devices, and PC builds.

Qualifications

• Proficient in Unity, Autodesk Maya, Adobe Substance (Houdini a plus)
• Ability to rapidly prototype and conduct R&D to inform feature scope and performance impacts
• Comfortable with managing scene budgets, draw calls, and performance profiling
• Strong in Physically Based Rendering (PBR) and Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NRP) workflows
• Experience with Unity render pipelines
• Proficient in creating shaders in Unity
• Proficient in artist tooling - C#, Python, MEL, JSON. (HLSL a plus)
• Strong portfolio showcasing lighting quality and lighting methods
• Understanding of post-processing and performance impacts
• Has a strong portfolio showcasing characters, dynamic and static environment components, lighting, and shaders all working together
• Experience with FX like weather, smoke, fire, interaction feedback FX, etc. in Unity
• Comfortable with entering into emerging tech such as ML, AI
• Experience with procedural world and asset building in Unity and Maya
• Portfolio showcases attention to detail and artistic talent
• Portfolio showcases problem solving capabilities and tooling to increase production speeds

PAY AND BENEFITS

Salary ranges may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location. Additional benefits for this role include: equity; and medical, dental, and vision benefits.