Artiste VFX principal New

Epic Games is hiring a Lead VFX Artist to join the Rocket League team in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This role sits within the art department and owns the full visual effects pipeline for a live service game, covering gameplay systems, cosmetic items, and arena environments. It suits a technical VFX artist who thinks in systems, has shipped multiple titles, and knows how to maintain visual quality under real-time performance constraints.

About the Role

Rocket League is one of the most active live service games in the industry, and this position is responsible for setting the VFX standard across every update, season, and cosmetic release that goes out the door. Day to day, you are building reusable effect systems in Niagara, reviewing work across the art team, and solving GPU budget problems before they become production problems. The role bridges technical art and visual development, requiring fluency in both shader authoring and the kind of feedback that raises an entire team’s output.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable VFX systems in Niagara that support rapid iteration across gameplay, cosmetics, and arena production.
• Author real-time effects across a range of visual styles, from physically grounded simulations to stylized motion graphics.
• Define GPU performance budgets in collaboration with technical art and engineering, managing draw calls, particle cost, and texture memory without sacrificing visual quality.
• Prototype and validate new VFX workflows, documenting standards that the broader team can follow consistently.
• Write and maintain shaders using HLSL or Unreal Engine’s Material Editor to support effect creation across the VFX pipeline.
• Mentor artists across disciplines, providing structured feedback that builds technical skills and lifts overall quality on the project.

What You Bring

• A portfolio of shipped real-time VFX work from released game titles, not student projects.
• Deep working knowledge of Niagara and Unreal Engine’s material system.
• Shader authoring experience in HLSL or Unreal’s Material Editor.
• Scripting ability in Python, Blueprint, or a comparable language is a strong differentiator for this role.
• Proven optimization experience with GPU profiling, including measurable results on shipped projects.
• Experience with Houdini for reference simulations is an asset, as is prior work on a live service game.

Why This Role

Epic Games covers 100 percent of benefit premiums for employees and dependents, including medical, dental, vision, critical illness, telemedicine, life insurance, and long-term disability, plus a competitive employer-matched retirement savings plan. Rocket League has one of the largest active player communities in games, which means the VFX work produced in this role reaches an audience at scale. For a senior VFX artist looking to own a full production pipeline rather than contribute to one, this is a principal-level position with real scope.

Apply now for the Lead VFX Artist role at Epic Games and bring your real-time VFX pipeline experience to one of the most visible live service titles in the industry.