Lead Artist

**Job Title**: Lead Artist
**Team**:Art & Animation
**Reporting into**: Head of A&A

**We are Sports Interactive**

The gaming studio behind: Football Manager.

Founded in 1994, Sports Interactive became a wholly owned subsidiary of SEGA Europe in 2006. Based at the Here East technology hub in Stratford, East London, the SI team continues to expand as we bring our titles to an ever-growing audience across an increasing variety of platforms.

To support our growth, we welcome the opportunity to connect with passionate people with the drive to match our ambitions and initiative to realise your individual potential.

**Position Overview**:
**Key Responsibilities**

**Manage and Lead Teams**:

- Oversee and guide both the Environment Art and Technical Art teams, ensuring artistic and technical excellence in every aspect of production.
- Provide mentorship and support to artists across both teams, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented work environment.
- Facilitate regular team meetings, feedback sessions, and one-on-ones to keep artists aligned with the project’s vision

**Collaboration and Cross-Disciplinary Work**:

- Serve as a point of contact between the art department and other disciplines, such as design, engineering, and production, to ensure seamless integration of assets and visual elements.
- Collaborate closely with the Head of Art & Animation and other leads to ensure the artistic vision is maintained

**Elevate Visual Quality**:

- Take ownership of improving and maintaining a high standard of visual quality across the project, ensuring environments, lighting, and procedural assets meet artistic and technical goals.
- Establish visual benchmarks and develop best practices to ensure consistency and cohesion across all aspects of the game's environment art and lighting.

**Lighting & Procedural Systems**:

- Oversee the development, optimisation, and implementation of lighting setups, ensuring they enhance the mood, atmosphere, and gameplay experience.
- Design and manage procedural workflows for the environment and technical art teams, ensuring efficient, scalable, and high-quality content creation.
- Provide knowledge in Unity’s lighting and potential procedural systems, ensuring that tools are effectively leveraged to push visual quality while optimising performance.

**Art Pipeline Management**:

- Collaborate with the Technical Art Team to optimise and enhance art production pipelines, ensuring efficient asset creation and integration into the game engine.
- Oversee the development of tools and processes to support procedural content creation, ensuring the team can deliver high-quality assets while maximising productivity.

**Performance Optimisation**:

- Work closely with tech artists to ensure that visual quality improvements do not come at the expense of performance.
- Collaborate with the engineering team to troubleshoot and resolve any performance-related issues.

**Strategic Art Planning**:

- Help define project milestones and deliverables, ensuring that the Environment and Tech Art teams remain on schedule while maintaining the highest possible quality standards.
- Provide regular updates to senior management, highlighting key achievements, challenges, and risks related to the visual development of the game.

**Vendor and Outsourcing Management**:

- Manage and communicate with any external art vendors or outsourcing teams, ensuring their work aligns with the internal teams' artistic vision and quality standards.

**Knowledge, Skills, and Experience**
- Minimum of 5+ years of professional experience in the game industry, with at least 1 year in a leadership or management role.
- Proven track record of delivering high-quality environment art, lighting, and procedural work in shipped AAA or high-quality games.
- Proficiency in Unity: Experience working with Unity’s lighting systems, procedural workflows, and tools for asset creation.
- Strong understanding of environment art, technical art, and how to optimise assets for real-time performance.
- Experience with lighting techniques (baked, real-time, dynamic) and the ability to set up lighting scenarios.
- Strong leadership skills with the ability to mentor, inspire, and develop talent across the art teams.
- Excellent cross-discipline communication skills, able to work effectively with game designers, engineers, and production teams.
- Demonstrated ability to solve complex visual and technical challenges, ensuring that the art pipeline is efficient and adaptable.

**Benefits of Working at Sports Interactive**:
A flexible working policy to best suit you and your team.
- Subsidised mental health, therapy and coaching sessions are available.
- Contributory Pension Scheme (up to 7% of annual salary).
- Free onsite evening bar in the Sports Interactive London HQ.
- A well-stocked breakfast bar with cereals, fruits, teas, and coffees.
- Regular events in collaboration with our partnered football clubs.
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Access to our on-sit