Lead Environment Concept Artist

Naughty Dog is looking for an experienced Environment Concept Artist to join our team in creating the next generation of award-winning storytelling!  You’ll be responsible for creating the captivating environments and props working alongside the Background and Layout Design teams to bring these environments to life.

Who we’re looking for:

• Communicates with Directors to bring directions to the environment concept team
• Manages and supports the environment concept team to make sure they get properly tasked and balances their workload, ensuring the environment concept team’s wellbeing
• Manages individual concept artists, to keep their work on schedule
• Builds and modifies schedule, based on the team and studio needs
• Maintains a clear and consistent workflow under an established schedule
• Works closely with Leads, Principals, and Directors to keep quality and style consistent across all environments
• Gives feedback to principals, seniors, and concept artists, to ensure environments are high quality and consistent
• Provides direction to concept artists for aesthetic and technical considerations and helps set the quality bar for environments
• Understands other department workflows and dependencies related to the environment concept team.
• Monitors the needs for Layout Design, Lighting, Background Art, and Foreground Art to ensure clear environments in-game
• Works closely with Background Art and Lighting to create environments that meet artistic requirements
• Works with principals to improve or solve workflow or pipeline issues and overall create strategies to achieve department goals.
• Had extensive knowledge of the latest game development tools, techniques, and workflows (including internal proprietary tools) and the ability to share this with the team
• As an individual contributor, be able to make environment concepts of the highest quality across the industry

What skills you will use:

• Great capacity for managing the environment concept team in terms of art and building achievable, realistic schedules, according to the needs of the studio
• Develop and maintain strong creative and collaborative partnerships across disciplines to help further develop the game environment and visual language
• Actively improve your skills and maintain an awareness of industry techniques, and tools, evaluate competitive products, learning new software packages and traditional art methods
• At least 8 years of experience as a concept artist, working on at least one AAA title
• Great capacity to give the team feedback and help set the quality bar
• Very strong portfolio showing high-quality concepts
• Expertise in concepting environments, high vision concept art, hard-surface props, key-frames, and production callouts for games
• Keen eye and strong foundational art skills to include form, lighting, colors, and composition
• Knowledge of working with various 3D packages, used in concept work and in collaboration with other departments