Senior Technical Artist – Lighting Pipeline

About Mob Entertainment

Mob Entertainment is the indie studio behind Poppy Playtime, the horror puzzle franchise beloved by millions worldwide. We build worlds defined by atmosphere, tension, and visual craft — and the technical infrastructure behind that craft matters as much as the art itself.

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Technical Artist to own the lighting pipeline for Poppy Playtime. This role lives at the intersection of Environment Art and DevOps — you'll bridge those teams, building tools and workflows that let artists move faster while plugging cleanly into our build, source control, and automation infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Own the UE5 lighting and bake pipeline end-to-end: configuration, distributed bake workflows, lightmap UV tooling, and bake validation
• Build and maintain Python and Unreal Editor tooling that automates lighting and environment tasks and integrates with our Perforce and Jenkins infrastructure
• Partner with DevOps to wire bakes and validation into Jenkins and surface pipeline telemetry
• Diagnose and fix bake failures, lightmap artifacts, and performance regressions
• Profile and optimize lighting cost across PC and console using Unreal Insights, RenderDoc, and stat commands
• Maintain technical documentation and debugging guides that let environment artists self-serve
• Act as the technical escalation point for lighting and bake-pipeline issues across the studio

Requirements

• 7+ years of games industry experience with at least two shipped titles, with significant time in a Technical Artist role
• Deep working knowledge of UE5 lighting and bake pipelines — what's supported, what's deprecated, and how to ship confined indoor environments
• Strong Python skills including the Unreal Python API
• Hands-on profiling and optimization experience using Unreal Insights, RenderDoc, and GPU profilers
• Comfortable in Perforce-based UE5 projects with stream workflows
• Experience integrating Unreal workflows with Jenkins or similar CI
• Strong communication skills in a remote-first studio; this role is half technical work, half bridging two cultures

Nice to Have

• Background in Environment Art transitioning into TA, or vice versa
• Experience writing Unreal commandlets or custom build steps
• Render programming or shader authoring background (HLSL, Material Editor)
• Familiarity with the Poppy Playtime universe and its visual language
• Knowledge of color management and LUT pipelines
• Passion for the horror genre and atmospheric storytelling