{"id":854239,"url":"https://alion.io/job/aesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd","title":"Technical Art Lead (f/m/d)","company":{"id":695075,"name":"Aesir Interactive","domain":"aesir-interactive.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/aesir-interactive","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Personio","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":87,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.333,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":378,"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"}},"role":"Games","role_family":"Games","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Munich, Germany"],"countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":65000,"max_usd":164000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":41},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":true,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"HLSL","optional":false},{"name":"Houdini","optional":false},{"name":"RenderDoc","optional":false},{"name":"Unreal Engine","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":true},{"name":"Scrum","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-14T09:01:15Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-14","last_verified_at":"2026-11-10T11:01:24Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":88,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":87},"description":"Your role:\nAs a Technical Art Lead, you are responsible for the technical art deliverables of a project, and for the way your team produces them. Tech Art at Aesir sits between Art and Tech and covers a wide surface: materials and shaders, animation systems, UI, VFX, audio integration, procedural content, and the tooling that keeps it maintainable. You lead a group of technical artists, VFX artists, animation artists and Unreal generalists.\nYou will work in Unreal Engine 5 on AA titles for PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch, in project teams of up to around 70 people. You represent your team towards the Product Owner, the other leads, and towards clients, publishers and outsourcing partners.\nYou own the performance budget of the project's content. Every week you report frame rate, memory and load times per hardware target: three PC spec levels, plus performance and quality mode on console. You name the bottleneck. Where the visual target and the frame rate disagree, you make the call and you explain it. You are also responsible for architecture. Our productions run for years and ship on more than one platform, so a pipeline that needs a specialist every week does not hold.\nThis is a hands on lead role. Part of your week goes into the engine, on architecture decisions and on the hardest problems. The rest goes into your people: you are the line manager for around three to five technical artists, including their goals and their development, and on a project you take the operational lead for the technical art group. The aim is a team that works on its own and stands behind the decisions it makes together.\nThe kind of stuff you`ll be doing:\nOwn the technical art deliverables of a project, and stand for them towards the Product Owner, the other leads and the client.\nBreak complex systems down together with your seniors, into architecture and work packages that fit what the other departments need.\nPlan and prioritise your team's workload, and clear impediments before they turn into blockers.\nSet workflows, conventions and architecture standards, write them down, and make sure they are followed.\nAgree quality expectations with the Product Owner and the other leads, and hold your team's output to them.\nOwn the performance budget: measure frame rate, memory and load times per platform, report them weekly with the bottleneck named, and decide where fidelity gives way to frame rate.\nReview your team's work, and give feedback that improves both the deliverable and the person.\nStay hands on where it counts: architecture decisions, the hardest technical problems, and the work nobody else can pick up yet.\nTrack where your team's skills do not yet cover what the project needs, and say what should happen about it: training, staffing, or a different plan.\nSpot risks early, in the production, in the team and in the deliverable, and act on them. Name the critical goals and the adjustable ones before a deadline forces the choice.\nGrow your people. You run their one to ones, agree their goals, and mentor on the technical and the personal side. Deliverables and architecture belong to the team rather than only to you.\nSteer outsourcing partners and agencies on technical art work, and drive cross-project topics: shared tooling, plugins and conventions that other Aesir projects build on.\nYour Profile\nMust-haves\n6+ years of professional experience in game development.\nExpert-level Unreal Engine 5 knowledge across the technical art surface: materials and shaders including HLSL, UMG and Slate, the animation framework (Motion Matching, Animation Blueprints, Control Rig, Level Sequencer), editor tooling, content pipelines, procedural workflows (PCG, Houdini), and the engine's rendering and asset systems.\nArchitecture and system design: you can structure a technical art stack that stays extensible and maintainable over a multi-year project, and you can break a complicated system into work other people can estimate.\nPerformance and optimisation: profiling with Unreal Insights, RenderDoc and the platform tools, plus a repertoire of measures (instancing, LODs and HLODs, streaming, culling, texture compression, PSOs) and a clear view of what each one costs in look and in maintainability.\nWorking knowledge of the neighbouring fields: rigging and animation, VFX, UI, audio integration, procedural generation. Enough to lead, review and staff them.\nYou have led technical work for other people: delegating, planning a workload, and being accountable for output that is not only your own.\nStrong communication: in technical depth with engineers, and in plain language with art, design, production, clients and publishers.\nPerforce, review processes and CI or build pipelines as part of a real production workflow.\nAn artistic eye, and a sense for pace and audio-visual impact.\nYou stay calm under production pressure and delegate, instead of passing the pressure on unfiltered. You speak up when something is wrong, you challenge assumptions with respect, and you can reflect on your own effect on the team.\nYou work in a way the team can copy: clean, documented, reusable. The team takes its cues from it.\nYou want to make games, not just work in games. We will ask what you last built, broke or took apart. A side project, a shader experiment, a mod, a tool that saved you an hour. Size does not matter, the pull does.\nYou learn continuously because you enjoy it. UE5 moves every few months, and the people who do well here find that interesting rather than exhausting.\nConfident English, spoken and written. It is our company and project language.\nMunich. That's where the team is and where we'd like you to be. We've made the occasional exception for someone exceptional. If you think that's you, make the case.\nNever held the title, or a year or two short of the six? Apply anyway if you have been the person the team already asks. We would rather see how you think about a team and a production than count years.\nNice-to-haves\nNobody has all of these. They're here so you can see what we actually work with.\nDeep expertise in one of our high-priority areas: performance optimisation in Unreal, in-engine animation systems, UI implementation, or procedural generation.\nAngelScript. We run a custom engine branch with AngelScript alongside C++ and Blueprint, and a lot of our gameplay and tooling is written in it.\nYou have led a technical art or tech team through a full production cycle.\nExperience with agile and with non-agile production, and a clear opinion on when to use which. Ours is adapted to how the studio actually works rather than textbook Scrum.\nClient or publisher facing work: milestone negotiation, feasibility discussions, scope trade-offs.\nSetting up and steering outsourcing partners for technical art or content work.\nShipped or supported console and lower-spec targets (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck), including their certification and performance realities.\nStudio-level tooling or plugins used across several projects.\nGerman, or the motivation to learn it.\nWhere this role goes\nThe scope grows with you, from one project to standards, tooling and pipelines that several projects depend on. Which parts, and how fast, depends on you and on what the studio needs next.\nWhat we offer:\nAn inspiring and creative work environment\nA 38-hour workweek to ensure a healthy work-life balance.\nRelocation support to ensure a smooth start in Munich.\nFlexibility through remote work options tailored to project requirements.\nFree drinks (soft drinks, coffee, tea) and weekly fresh organic fruits.\nMonthly top-up of a company card worth €50, usable for various purchases*.\nTable tennis and foosball tables for relaxation after demanding tasks.\nExciting company events that foster knowledge exchange and provide space for fun and recreation.\nCoverage of public transportation costs and meal subsidies*.\n*After successful completion of the probation period.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7927,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Company events"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":[],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-13T05:26:28Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":69,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":0.8,"age_days":87,"expected_fill_days":378,"reasons":["conf:1","win:early","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-10T06:52:35Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/aesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/aesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-10T14:11:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":32957,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":695075},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=695075"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Faesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Faesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Faesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/aesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Faesir-interactive-technical-art-lead-fmd"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":854239}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"aesir-interactive.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":854239},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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