Principal VFX Artist

In this role you’ll work closely with the Art Director, Game Designers, and other disciplines to hone a visual style and implement in-game VFX. You understand the critical role VFX plays in expressing gameplay, and you have deep craft knowledge across all artistic aspects of VFX that contribute to a polished player experience -- timing, color, shape, thematic coherence, etc.

Ideally, you have:

• 5+ years of experience in games
• A track record of creating beautiful, delightful and highly readable VFX
• Excellent grasp of shape design, color theory, and animation principles as they relate to VFX
• Experience in another area of art for games such as concept art, environment art, or character animation
• Strong understanding of Unreal and content pipelines
• Hunger to have a huge impact on a small team at a fast pace

We are a small team with big ambitions. We are hungry and want to win. We want to stay small, move fast, and ship early (while we’re still embarrassed). Whenever possible we opt to buy vs. build and we view game development as our craft - not our specialized sub-disciplines. We’re looking for people who thrive with a lot of freedom and responsibility; who wear a lot of different hats comfortably; and who are always, always acting on behalf of the player.

A key aspect of our compensation philosophy is that value creation should be aligned with rewards. Right now this means that equity is a significant portion of every full-time employee’s compensation and in the future we will look at tools like performance based bonuses and profit sharing. What will always be true is that if we win, we win together. Theorycraft offers competitive base salaries and generous equity packages for full-time employees. As a pre-revenue startup, our base salary range for all roles, including this one, is $80k-$225k. Final base salary will be determined by an array of factors including internal equity, job related knowledge, skills, and work experience. In addition to a competitive base salary and equity, employees at Theorycraft will receive all of our other great benefits and perks, including unlimited, open PTO, health, vision, dental insurance for you and your family, and an annual game budget.

We believe that people on our team should live their best lives while doing their best work (and that these should complement each other!). Therefore we’ve committed to distributed work (within 3 timezones of PST), with regular, in-person meetups to stay connected as a team. We support families and all of the unpredictability children can bring (especially when working from home). We offer unlimited, open PTO, competitive base salary, health, vision, dental insurance for you and your family, an annual game budget, and, of course, equity as a way to ensure that we all succeed together.