Senior II Lighting Artist – Unannounced Game | Irvine, CA or Albany, NY

Team Name:

At Blizzard, we craft genre‑defining games and legendary worlds for all to share. Through unparalleled creativity and storytelling, we create immersive universes and iconic characters that are beloved across platforms, borders, backgrounds, and generations – only made possible by building a work environment that cultivates the artistry of game development and unleashes the aspirations of our people.

We are looking for a Senior II Lighting Artist to help craft a new, unannounced game for Blizzard. As a senior individual contributor, you will support and develop all aspects of lighting across characters, environments, and cinema tics. You thrive in the technical and artistic balance of photometric lighting, cameras, lenses, and post‑processing, and enjoy diving deep into topics such as the exposure triangle and inverse‑square falloff.

You are comfortable operating in a dynamic environment, navigating fluid deadlines and changing priorities with purpose.

Location Fixed

This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, with some work on‑site and some work from home. The potential home studio for this role is Irvine, CA or Albany, NY.

Priorities can often change in a fast‑paced environment like ours, so this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:

• Partner with Directors and Leads to design and implement high‑quality character and environment lighting in Unreal Engine.
• Collaborate closely across disciplines to ensure lighting solutions support both aesthetic goals and gameplay readability.
• Treat every frame as a composition, using atmospherics, color, light, post‑processing, and shadow to enhance mood and storytelling.
• Demonstrate expertise in cinematic global lighting and atmospheric looks, including the creation of lighting Blueprints and light functions.
• Work with Technical Art and Engineering teams to maintain performance targets and diagnose lighting‑related artifacts and issues.
• Contribute to lighting workflows, documentation, and best practices that scale across the team.

• 12 years of professional experience working on AAA game‑development teams in a lighting or closely related role.
• Confirmed experience shipping at least one major title in a relevant capacity.
• Proven experience delivering high‑quality lighting solutions in collaboration with art, design, and engineering partners.

• In‑depth knowledge of AAA game engines with a strong understanding of multiple approaches to lighting and look development.
• Extensive Unreal Engine experience, including lighting channels, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM), hardware ray tracing (HWRT), and Mega Lights.
• Expert‑level understanding of the interaction between physically‑based rendering and lighting.
• Superb grasp of color theory, composition, and visual storytelling.
• Strong ability to analyze, debug, and optimize lighting for both visual quality and performance.

• A team‑oriented approach to your work, with a strong emphasis on collaboration and cross‑disciplinary partnership.
• The ability to inspire and elevate others through craft excellence and an enthusiastic approach to game development.
• A self‑motivated, proactive problem‑solver who can independently drive complex lighting tasks to completion.
• Strong communication and documentation skills.

• Experience creating and maintaining post‑process materials.
• Strong illustration or photography background.
• Experience working through early‑development and R&D phases of a project.
• Passion for playing a wide variety of video games.

Portfolio showcasing lighting work, including detailed breakdowns that demonstrate artistic intent, technical execution, and problem‑solving.

Your Platform

Best known for iconic video game universes including Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, and Star Craft®, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (), a division of Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment experiences.…