Lead Environment Artist

About the role…

• Inspire and guide: Lead and mentor a team of environment artists, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented environment by setting expectations and providing constructive feedback to help artists grow and succeed.
• Shape the vision: Drive the creative and technical vision for environment art, ensuring a consistent and high-quality aesthetic.
• Craft immersive worlds: Take high-level ideas and undefined concepts - even as rough as a whiteboard sketch - and develop them into fully realized game environments.
• Ensure quality and efficiency: Be accountable for the team’s output, delivering polished, immersive worlds that align with gameplay needs.
• Collaborate across disciplines: Work closely with design, engineering, and other teams to align art direction with gameplay, technical constraints, and performance goals. Ensure environment art assets meet artistic, technical, and optimization standards for a seamless player experience.
• Balance leadership and hands-on creation: You’ll lead a small, focused, highly collaborative team where you’ll push ideas forward independently, without much guidance, while adapting and iterating based on the needs of the game. You’ll set the standard for quality while guiding the team and contributing to asset creation.
• Embrace innovation: Research new tools, workflows, and techniques to push the quality bar.
• Build the team: Contribute to studio-wide hiring, onboarding, and team-building efforts to cultivate and grow our environment art discipline.
• Foster accountability and self-sufficiency within the team—while support is available, success in this role requires the ability to drive ideas forward and problem-solve proactively.

We’re excited about you because you…

• Are an experienced leader: You have leadership experience in a AAA environment art role and thrive on mentoring and developing teams.
• Thrive on ownership: You have a strong sense of ownership and enjoy being accountable for a team’s success.
• Are self-driven: You thrive in ambiguity and can take a high-level vision and turn it into reality without needing every detail defined.
• Have shipped a AAA title: You have 7+ years of experience as an Environment Artist in game development, with at least one shipped AAA title in a leadership role.
• Excel in small teams: You produce your best work on small, collaborative teams. If you produce your best work on big teams with lots of specialized roles, this is not the right fit for you.
• Have a strong artistic eye: You possess a keen eye for architecture, material definition, lighting, color theory, and world-building.
• Are technically proficient: You are highly proficient in Maya (or other 3D modeling packages), ZBrush, Photoshop, and Substance Painter.
• Understand game engines: You have extensive experience working with game engines (Unreal, Unity) and understand PBR materials, UV layout, performance optimizations, and world-building workflows.
• Value collaboration: You can effectively communicate and collaborate across disciplines.
• Are passionate about mentorship: You are passionate about team development and fostering a positive, inclusive work environment.
• Balance creativity and production: You understand how to balance creative vision with production realities and are skilled at making strategic trade-offs.
• Have a growth mindset: You value both teaching and learning from others.

You’ll love working at Bonfire because we…

• Are passionate about our game: We're excited to playtest it daily as a team and can’t wait to share it with the world!
• Strive for excellence: We're dedicated to excellence and love pushing the limits of what we can create together.
• Value ownership: We care about building an environment where people have meaningful impact and ownership of their work.
• Build authentic relationships: We prioritize strong relationships and regularly bring people together.
• Encourage growth: We offer opportunities to learn and contribute beyond your focused discipline.