Senior Lighting Artist

ARCANAUT STUDIOS

Senior Lighting Artist

FULL-TIME | BC OR ALBERTA

(REMOTE FRIENDLY)

OUR ARC

Arcanaut Studios is a team of seasoned developers founded on the axiom that creative freedom and independence lead to better, more innovative games. We believe in the power of small, agile teams.We are decision makers with consistent collaboration across disciplines that drive the project vision and create a seamless player experience.

Arcanaut Studios is a Canadian company with offices in Edmonton, AB and Kelowna, BC.We offer a flexible work environment combining from-home, in-office, and remote work as well as competitive industry compensation and benefits. By joining us, you will be welcomed into a diverse team of talented developers creating an immersive universe of story, character, and discovery.

YOUR ARC

As the Senior Lighting Artist, you serve as the ultimate subject matter expert and visionary force for the lighting, atmosphere and visual narrative our game. In this highly technical and artistic role, you will define the visual boundaries of real-time environments, cinematic storytelling, and dynamic time of day systems. You will work closely with Art & Tech to establish industry-leading lighting pipelines and push PBR workflows to their limits, while ensuring our expansive world balances awe inspiring visuals with optimized target platform performance.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the Art Director and Art Lead to establish visual and emotional tone of the world, authoring look-development for key exterior zones, complex interiors, and cinematics.
• Partner with Technical Artists to build, refine, and document highly scalable real-time lighting pipelines, specifically leveraging modern dynamic lighting systems and advanced global illumination techniques with Unreal Engine 5+.
• Represent lighting in cross discipline build reviews, milestone planning and production meetings to define and prioritize tasks associated with goals.
• Establish lighting benchmarks and visual quality targets.
• Troubleshoot and solve bugs and performance improvements.
• Utilize lighting to guide player navigation, emphasize tactical combat arenas, and amplify major cinematic story-beat moments.
• Oversee the tuning of look up tables, color grading, exposure controls, HDR display calibration and screen-space post effects like bloom, ambient occlusion, and depth of field.
• Profile levels and cutscenes to maximize lighting quality on both characters and environments, managing memory budgets, frame rates, and hardware constraints across console and PC platforms.
• Drive technical growth with external lighting crews by establishing documentation, review standards, and offering guidance and constructive feedback.

Qualifications and Experience

• 8+ years of professional experience in video game lighting with a proven track record of shipping 2+ high-quality AAA titles in a Senior or Principal role.
• Strong background lighting large scale, atmospheric virtual worlds, featuring dynamic environmental systems.
• Advanced expertise in Unreal Engine 5.
• Deep understanding of modern lighting technologies including real-time ray tracing, global illumination, lumen, virtual shadow maps, and mega lights.
• A masterful eye for color theory, filmic lighting set ups, theatrical staging, and photography principles to bridge the gap between active and cinematic sequences.
• Fluent experience working within cross discipline teams and pipelines.

BENEFITS

• We offer a rewards package to help you live your best life while doing your best work, including medical and dental coverage, retirement savings contributions and a Flex Benefit program that has a wide array of coverage to best fit your personal situation.
• We offer 3 weeks of vacation per year in addition to summer and winter studio breaks that are each two weeks long.
• The hiring range for this position is $97,000 – $190,000 in addition to a bi-yearly performance-based bonus. The base pay may vary depending on the candidate’s region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.