Senior Technical Artist – Expression of Interest – ILM San Francisco

Job Position(s): Senior Technical Artist - Expression of Interest - ILM San Francisco

ILM is accepting expressions of interest for a Senior Technical Artist based in San Francisco, CA, with the role sitting inside ILM’s Interactive division. This position is responsible for building real-time VFX pipelines, developing shaders and procedural systems, and bridging the content and engineering teams on immersive experience productions. It suits a technical artist with a background in VR/AR development or games who wants to bring that craft to bear on high-profile immersive storytelling projects.

About the Role

The Interactive team at ILM has shipped award-winning VR and location-based projects including Vader Immortal and the Oscar-winning CARNE y ARENA, and this Senior Technical Artist role sits at the center of that production workflow. Day to day, the work involves look development, asset optimization, shader authoring, and building tools that help artists and designers hit both visual and performance targets inside real-time environments. This is a technical art role with genuine creative weight, not a pure pipeline or tools position.

Key Responsibilities

• Prototype and implement procedural visual systems, shaders, lighting rigs, and particle effects for real-time immersive productions.
• Lead look development passes on environmental elements, atmospherics, and post-process VFX across scene and level builds in Unreal Engine.
• Define and manage technical asset requirements by coordinating between character artists, environment artists, and engineers throughout production.
• Write and maintain tools and scripts using Blueprints and Python to support artist workflows and accelerate rapid prototyping.
• Own asset performance profiling and optimization, including LODs, shaders, asset streaming, collisions, and material standards across the VFX pipeline.
• Mentor other technical artists, establish best practices for real-time asset production, and drive adoption of new techniques across the team.

What You Bring

• Five or more years of experience in games, film, television, AR/VR, or closely related real-time production fields.
• Proficiency in Maya, Houdini, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine, including Blueprint scripting and material networks.
• Scripting experience in Python, C++, C#, or MEL, with a solid working understanding of linear algebra as it applies to real-time rendering.
• Strong 3D art fundamentals across modeling, UV mapping, texturing, animation, and lighting optimized for real-time workflows.

Why This Role

ILM’s Interactive team has a track record of genuine firsts in immersive entertainment, with credits that span VR, AR, and location-based formats that have reached major awards recognition. For a Senior Technical Artist who wants to work at the intersection of real-time rendering and high-end visual effects production, the project history and technical scope here are hard to match. This is an expression of interest posting, meaning the role is not currently open, but submitting now puts you in consideration when a position becomes available.

Submit your expression of interest for the Senior Technical Artist role at ILM in San Francisco and get your work in front of the team building the next generation of immersive storytelling.