Lighting Supervisor

Do you know how to shape mood, story, and atmosphere through light - and how guide a team to deliver beautiful work under real production pressure?

We’re looking for a Lighting Supervisor to lead our Lighting department and help raise the creative and technical standard of our final images.

Based in Tokyo,this is a senior creative leadership role for someone who combines a strong eye, deep technical understanding, and calm, practical team leadership. You’ll work across multiple productions, supporting artists, partnering with supervisors and production, and ensuring our lighting work is consistent, polished, and delivered to the highest standard.

We’re looking for someone who can lead with clarity and confidence - someone who understands both the artistic and technical side of lighting, communicates well with artists and stakeholders, and knows how to keep a team moving without losing sight of quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Creative leadership: Define and maintain the lighting approach for projects, ensuring the work supports the visual style, mood, story, and overall creative direction.
• Department leadership: Lead the Lighting team across multiple shows, setting clear expectations, maintaining quality, and helping artists stay focused and supported.
• Look development and visual consistency: Work with supervisors, LookDev, and CG teams to ensure lighting, shading, rendering, and final image quality remain consistent across shots and sequences.
• Shot and sequence oversight: Review lighting work at shot and sequence level, identifying creative, technical, and continuity issues before they affect delivery.
• Review and feedback: Lead lighting reviews and dailies, giving clear, constructive, and actionable feedback that helps artists improve the work efficiently.
• Production alignment: Work closely with Production to balance creative goals with schedules, priorities, artist capacity, render resources, and delivery deadlines.
• Pipeline collaboration: Partner with Pipeline, TDs, and technical teams to improve lighting workflows, rendering practices, scene management, and artist tools.
• Rendering and optimisation:Help guide decisions around render quality, efficiency, troubleshooting, optimisation, and resource usage.
• Problem solving:Support the team in resolving creative and technical challenges, helping identify root causes and practical solutions.
• Team development: Mentor Lighting artists at different levels, support career growth, and help build a strong, collaborative, and accountable team culture.
• Cross-department collaboration: Work closely with CG Supervisors, VFX Supervisors, Compositing, Assets, FX, Production, and other departments to ensure lighting supports the wider production needs.
• Standards and documentation: Help maintain lighting standards, workflows, templates, documentation, and best practices across the department.
• Vendor and external work: When required, review lighting or lookdev work from external partners and ensure it meets the studio’s creative and technical standards.
• Continuous improvement: Stay aware of relevant tools, workflows, and industry trends, and help guide practical improvements that benefit the department and studio.

What You'll Bring:

• Proven experience supervising Lighting in a VFX or animation studio.
• Strong artistic eye, with a deep understanding of lighting, composition, colour, mood, atmosphere, and final image quality.
• Strong technical understanding of rendering, shading, scene optimisation, and lighting workflows.
• Experience leading artists across shots, sequences, or multiple shows.
• Excellent communication, organisation, and problem-solving skills.
• Calm, clear, and supportive leadership style, with the ability to guide teams under production pressure.
• Strong working knowledge of tools such as Maya, Houdini, Katana, Nuke, Solaris, RenderMan, or similar production tools.
• Familiarity with USD-based workflows is an asset.
• Experience working with Production to manage priorities, schedules, resources, and delivery expectations.
• Ability to mentor artists, give useful feedback, and support the growth of the team.
• Collaborative mindset, with the confidence to take ownership and follow work through to completion.
• Proficiency in English is required.
• Japanese language skills are considered an asset.

If you’re ready to help light the way and shape the final image, we'd love to hear from you!