Director, Art Direction - Unpublished R&D Product
Los Angeles · 8+ years experience · Posted Sep 25, 2026
At a glance
- Experience
- 8+ years experience
- Location
- Los Angeles
About the role
- Art Directors at Riot drive the quality and performance of their team, establishing direction and goals that provide clarity and focus.
- As an Art Director an unpublished R&D product, you will help bring the game’s visual direction to life in a new game for players around the world.
- You will translate our creative direction into a distinctive, emotionally compelling, production-ready visual identity that supports gameplay.
Responsibilities
- Steward the game’s visual identity from concept through production
- Translate creative direction into clear visual standards, production practices, and scalable art workflows
- Drive visual quality, appeal, and gameplay readability across all player-facing art
- Apply deep expertise in the art style across art, animation, VFX, visual storytelling, and character-driven experiences
- Balance artistic ambition with technical requirements and production realities
- Build, lead, and mentor high-performing internal and external art teams
- Direct co-development partners, vendors, and distributed creative talent to deliver consistently high-quality work
- Partner across design, narrative, audio, engineering, product, and IP to ensure art strengthens the player experience
- Provide clear visual feedback through reviews, paintovers, references, and development guidance
- Maintain deep awareness of the art style, creative influences, and evolving player expectations
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience developing games, with 8+ years leading art teams
- Experience as an Art Director or key artistic decision maker on at least one shipped 3D game
- Experience delivering games with strong character appeal in both model and animation
- Strong understanding of the pipelines, production techniques, and technical constraints required to deliver stylized visuals in games
- Strong artistic judgment across character design, composition, shape language, color, lighting, animation, VFX, and gameplay readability
- Experience balancing visual quality against technical, production, platform, and team-size constraints
- Experience building, leading, mentoring, and aligning art teams across cross-functional game development
- Experience directing external vendors or distributed art teams
- Champion of healthy creative processes that support iteration, alignment, scalable production, and strong artistic quality
- A portfolio demonstrating strong artistic judgment, visual clarity, compositional skill, and stylistic range
Benefits
- Open paid time off policy
- Flexible work schedules
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Life insurance
- Parental leave for employee, spouse/domestic partner, and children
- 401k with company match
Skills
- Unreal
- Unity
- 3D
- VFX
- Animation
- Character Design
- Composition
- Lighting