Principal Environment Artist

Principal Environment Artist (R27370)

Epic Games is seeking a Principal Environment Artist to help define and elevate the visual quality of Fortnite's worlds. This role combines hands-on environment art production, artistic leadership, and technical problem-solving. You will create benchmark-quality work, establish visual standards, develop scalable workflows, and solve complex artistic and technical challenges. Working closely with Art Direction, Technical Art, Design, Engineering, and Production, you will help align visual quality with gameplay, performance, memory, and production requirements while mentoring artists and advancing environment art practices across the project.
In this role, you will:
Create benchmark-quality environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete scenes that establish the visual quality bar for Fortnite
Establish and maintain environment art standards across composition, lighting, color, atmosphere, materials, visual storytelling, gameplay readability, and environmental polish
Develop and improve scalable environment art workflows that increase visual quality, consistency, production efficiency, and content reuse across the project
Partner with Technical Art and Engineering to develop content creation pipelines, and maintain environment art documentation, best practices, workflows, and quality standards
Identify and resolve complex artistic and technical problems while balancing visual quality, runtime performance, memory usage, platform requirements, and production schedules
Mentor artists across different experience levels by providing technical guidance, artistic critique, workflow support, and professional development
Evaluate emerging tools, technologies, and production techniques and recommend improvements that meaningfully advance the environment art team's capabilities
What we're looking for:
Bachelor's degree or at least 10 years of progressive professional experience creating real-time 3D environments for commercially released video games
Professional experience creating production-ready environment assets, materials, modular kits, and complete real-time scenes
Preferably professional experience using Unreal Engine for environment world-building, PBR materials, lighting, content implementation, and optimization
Professional experience optimizing real-time environment content for performance, memory usage, visual quality, and multiple hardware platforms
Professional experience using a 3D content creation application such as Maya, 3ds Max, or Blender; texture-authoring software such as Substance Painter or Substance Designer; and image-editing software such as Photoshop or equivalent professional tools
Experience developing or improving environment art workflows, pipelines, documentation, or quality standards
Experience reviewing the work of other artists and providing actionable artistic and technical feedback
Experience mentoring or providing professional guidance to environment artists
Portfolio demonstrating professional environment artwork, including examples of 3D modeling, materials, composition, lighting, world-building, and completed real-time environments
Strong written and verbal communication skills and demonstrated experience collaborating with multidisciplinary development teams
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience developing large-scale worlds for a AAA, multiplayer, or continuously updated game
Experience with procedural environment creation, advanced material systems, shader workflows, terrain systems, or environment art tools
Experience establishing visual benchmarks and discipline-wide quality standards
Experience collaborating with external development partners or reviewing externally produced environment artwork
Experience delivering environment content across multiple platforms with different performance and memory constraints
This role is open to multiple locations across the US (including CA, NYC, & WA).