Rendering Technical Artist II - League of Legends (Contract)

Riot Games was established in 2006 by entrepreneurial gamers who believe that player-focused game development can result in great games. In 2009, Riot released its debut title, League of Legends, to critical and player acclaim. Players form the foundation of our community, and it’s for them that we continue to evolve and improve the League of Legends experience. We’re looking for humble but ambitious, razor-sharp professionals who can teach us a thing or two. We promise to return the favor. Like us, you take play seriously; you’re passionate about games. We embrace those who see things differently, aren’t afraid to experiment, and who have a healthy disregard for constraints. That’s where you come in. As a Rendering Technical Artist (Contract) on the Singapore League of Legends PC Team, you’ll help bring the world of Runeterra and beyond to life through materials, lighting, and real-time rendering. League’s visual targets are built on a modern real-time, PBR-based rendering pipeline with stylized, hand-painted treatments, and you’ll author, extend, and maintain the shaders and materials that realize them across champions, skins, and related content. Working closely with artists, designers, engineers, and external partners, you’ll act as a bridge between art and engineering—translating visual and art-direction goals into robust, performant solutions that behave consistently across around-game and in-game environments. As an experienced technical artist, you’ll also diagnose rendering issues early, reduce rework, and help raise the craft bar for how shaders and materials are authored across internal and external teams. Reporting to the Technical Art Manager, you will ensure that assets meet technical performance standards and artistic direction requirements. In collaboration with Art, Design, Engineering, and external partners, you will contribute to production support and workflow improvements. Please note that Riot Games does not offer relocation packages for this position. You need to be able to work legally in Singapore, without Riot Games’ sponsorship, to be considered. Responsibilities: • Author, extend, and maintain real-time shaders and materials for League of Legends within a PBR-based rendering workflow, including reusable shader functions and shared material systems that scale across champions and skins. • Apply strong PBR fundamentals across albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, emissive, lighting, and reflection-probe inputs, ensuring shader features account for the full material response rather than the diffuse channel in isolation. • Collaborate directly with Art and Design to understand desired visual behaviors and art direction, and translate them into clear, achievable, and performant rendering solutions. • Provide hands-on technical support to internal and external vendor artists, helping them author, integrate, and troubleshoot materials and shaders for Epic and Legendary skins. • Validate assets across neutral lighting, around-game, and in-game environments and applicable quality levels, diagnosing issues involving lighting, shadows, material response, shader parameters, and texture inputs. • Collaborate with engineering to manage in-game memory budgets, profile shader and rendering cost, and optimize game performance using tools such as RenderDoc or equivalent GPU-capture tools. • Integrate visual assets from external vendors into the game engine using Perforce, working closely with the Art Director and Technical Art Manager to maintain quality and consistency. • Create and maintain clear technical documentation—shader and material workflows, authoring standards, and best practices—and develop custom tools and scripts so artists can work more independently. Required Qualifications: • 4+ years of professional experience as a Technical Artist in game development or a related real-time graphics field. • Demonstrated hands-on experience writing, debugging, and shipping shaders for a modern real-time, PBR-based game engine, with a strong understanding of how albedo, normal, roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion, lighting, and reflections combine to define surface response. • Ability to read, write, and debug common real-time shader languages such as HLSL and GLSL, along with node-based shader graphs or comparable proprietary shader and material systems. • Strong skills in modeling, shaders, texturing, and lighting for games, with an understanding of stylized, hand-painted content pipelines and how visual style, color, and lighting direction influence material and shader approaches. • Proficiency in commercial or proprietary game engines (e.g. Unity/Unreal), with familiarity in performance profiling, GPU cost analysis, memory budgets, and optimization across a range of hardware. • Strong technical writing skills, with experience creating and maintaining clear technical documentation such as shader and material guides, authoring standards, and workflow references. • Familiarity with version control systems such as Git or Perforce. • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to act as an ambassador between art and engineering and collaborate effectively with external partners and internal teams. Desired Qualifications: • Experience with stylized PBR rendering, toon/PBR hybrid workflows, or other non-photoreal real-time rendering approaches. • Experience creating shaders for character materials such as skin, hair, cloth, or metal. • Experience with material-driven systems, runtime material parameters, VFX integration, or gameplay-driven visual hooks. • Experience developing tools or scripts in Python or another scripting language to improve art and rendering workflows. • Experience with content creation tools such as Maya, Photoshop, Substance, or Marmoset Toolbag, and a solid understanding of 3D math, linear algebra, and color space. • Experience supporting external vendors through documentation, training, reviews, and…