Lead Technical Artist

Company Description NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. We create world-class content, which we distribute across our portfolio of film, television, and streaming, and bring to life through our global theme park destinations, consumer products, and experiences. We own and operate leading entertainment and news brands, including NBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, Telemundo, NBC Local Stations, Bravo, and Peacock, our premium ad-supported streaming service. We produce and distribute premier filmed entertainment and programming through our powerhouse film and television studios, including Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, and Focus Features, and the four global television studios under the Universal Studio Group banner, and operate industry-leading theme parks and experiences around the world through Universal Destinations & Experiences, including Universal Orlando Resort, home to Universal Epic Universe, and Universal Studios Hollywood. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. Visit www.nbcuniversal.com for more information.

Our impact is rooted in improving the communities where our employees, customers, and audiences live and work. We have a rich tradition of giving back and ensuring our employees have the opportunity to serve their communities. We champion an inclusive culture and strive to attract and develop a talented workforce to create and deliver a wide range of content reflecting our world.

As a Lead Technical Artist, you are responsible for defining and driving the technical art vision, standards, workflows, and execution across the project. You sit at the intersection of Art, Design, Engineering, Animation, UI, Audio, and Production, ensuring that the project's visual ambition remains achievable, scalable, performant, and maintainable across PC, console, and mobile platforms. You are both a strategic leader and a hands-on problem solver, overseeing the technical health of the project while building the systems, pipelines, and teams that enable content creators to work efficiently and effectively. Your role is to ensure technical art is a force multiplier for the entire development organization.

• Lead, mentor, and grow the Technical Art organization, including hiring, performance management, career development, and technical leadership across all technical art disciplines.
• Define and enforce technical art standards, workflows, performance budgets, and content requirements across characters, animation, gameplay, VFX, environments, UI, and audio.
• Own the technical art strategy for Unreal Engine 5 across PC, console, and mobile platforms, ensuring that content scales appropriately while maintaining visual quality and runtime performance.
• Partner closely with Engineering to drive engine extensions, rendering features, content validation systems, automation, build pipelines, custom asset workflows, profiling tools, and platform optimization initiatives.
• Own and evolve the project's content pipeline strategy from DCC tools through Unreal Engine and deployment workflows. Establish standards for asset ingestion, validation, automation, CI/CD integration, and creator-facing tooling.
• Drive cross-disciplinary alignment between Art, Design, Animation, Gameplay Engineering, Rendering Engineering, Tools Engineering, and Production. Ensure technical constraints and content requirements are clearly understood and effectively implemented.
• Provide technical leadership for character pipelines, rigging systems, shaders, materials, animation technologies, gameplay VFX, runtime interactions, and content optimization workflows.
• Build and oversee tooling and automation using Unreal Engine tooling frameworks, Python, and DCC scripting to improve productivity, consistency, and content quality across the project.
• Define and maintain platform performance budgets, profiling methodologies, validation rules, and optimization standards, with particular attention to mobile scalability, memory constraints, thermals, battery usage, and rendering cost.
• Establish and maintain robust documentation, onboarding processes, standards, and technical guidance to ensure teams can successfully scale and operate with confidence.
• Review technical art work across the project and provide clear, actionable feedback that improves quality, performance, maintainability, and scalability.
• Partner with leadership to define and execute the long-term technical art roadmap as the project evolves into a scalable platform.
• Serve as the escalation point for the most complex technical art, content pipeline, performance, and tooling challenges on the project.
• Stay current with industry trends, Unreal Engine advancements, content creation technologies, rendering techniques, tooling practices, automation frameworks, and mobile platform developments.