Riot Games is hiring: Technical Art Director - Central Creative Team in Los Ange

Overview

Technical Art Director - Central Creative Team at Riot Games. Lead efforts to understand and improve Riot’s core creative suite of content creation tools, partnering with Senior Tech Artists, Art, Engineering, and Production Leadership to guide creation and implementation of tools, workflows, and pipelines that enable creatives to iterate efficiently.

This role blends technical expertise, creative vision, and leadership to help Riot align around and execute a new approach to shared creative pipelines. The Technical Art Director on the Central Creative team reports to the Senior Director of Operations and drives the vision for optimizing Riot’s creative pipelines to leverage shared development at company scale, guiding ethical and effective use of AI tools and establishing a path to deliver these features to creatives everywhere.

Responsibilities

• Design and execute strategy for implementation and refinement of art pipelines that leverage automation and procedural generation techniques to reduce manual work and improve production efficiency.
• Explore and champion internal processes through which teams across Riot can benefit from shared tooling innovation and refinement.
• Collaborate with software engineers, tool developers, and production teams to build efficient workflows for asset creation, integration, and management.
• Identify opportunities to integrate AI and machine learning tools to automate repetitive tasks, such as asset generation, procedural content creation, texture generation, or animation.
• Develop strategies for the deployment of AI tools across stages of production, from concept art to final rendering.
• Act as the bridge between the art department, engineering teams, and production management, ensuring artistic needs are met while technical solutions are feasible and effective.
• Collaborate with Art Directors, VFX Supervisors, and other stakeholders to align on creative goals and identify areas where technology can enhance the vision.
• Continuously assess and improve existing production pipelines, identifying bottlenecks or inefficiencies and implementing solutions to streamline processes.
• Document workflows, standards, and best practices to ensure consistency and scalability across teams.
• Consult on project timelines and resource allocation to optimize production schedules using technical expertise.
• Stay up-to-date with AI, ML, and automation advancements in art and entertainment, identifying trends and technologies that can enhance production quality and efficiency.
• Partner with the internal Production AI team to lead R&D efforts to prototype new tools, workflows, and techniques for future projects.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience as a technical artist or rendering engineer with deep digital content creation and tools development knowledge in games or related industries.
• 8+ years of leadership experience in games or related industries.
• Experience bringing stakeholders together to drive alignment on strategy and vision.
• Experience building strategic visions and working with leadership in large organizations.
• Ability to act as an ambassador between art and engineering.
• Mastery in at least one major game engine (e.g., Unreal, Unity, Frostbite, CryEngine) or a mature proprietary engine that supports AAA games at scale.
• Experience building long-term maintainable, testable, portable, easy-to-use, and stable systems.
• Experience in multiple aspects of 3D pipelines (rigging, modeling, texturing, look development).
• Proficiency with one or more programming or scripting languages (e.g., Python, C++, C#).

Desired Qualifications

• Experience developing relationships and influencing DCC providers (e.g., Adobe, Autodesk, ZBrush).
• Experience with ZBrush, Substance, Houdini, and Simplygon pipelines.
• Experience working with external vendors and technology partners.
• Experience with software engineering, tools development, and computer graphics.
• Experience in rendering and shader development (e.g., HLSL and GLSL).

For this role, success comes from craft expertise, collaboration, and decision-making that prioritizes player delight. We value past studies, experience, and a personal relationship with games, and we look for player empathy in applicants.

Perks and Equal Opportunity

Riot has a focus on work/life balance with an open paid time off policy, medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave, and a 401k with company match. We provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and will make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals. Riot does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, criminal history, or any other category protected by applicable law. We consider applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law, including fair chance acts where applicable.

These duties may evolve based on business needs and additional responsibilities may be assigned as necessary to maintain operational efficiency and security.

We are committed to creating collaborative teams where you are empowered to bring your unique perspective every day. If this sounds like the place you want to work, we look forward to your application.