Principal VFX Artist | Unannounced Title, New Games

Descrizione del lavoro:

Craft:Art

Job Description:
New Games Studio is looking for a highly skilled Principal VFX Artist to join us.
This is a senior, hands-on and creative role for someone who can take visual effects from ideation to final in-game implementation. You will help define, design, build, and polish the VFX language of the game, working closely with art, design, tech art, engineering, and production.

We are looking for someone who combines strong artistic judgment with deep hands-on Unity experience. You should be able to generate ideas, explore visual directions, create effects directly in-engine, and push them to a high level of polish. You are self-driven, well organized, and comfortable taking ownership without needing close day-to-day direction.

You should be able to understand the needs of the game, identify what needs to be done, and push visual quality forward while staying mindful of performance, production realities, and the overall player experience.

Your role within our Kingdom

As a Principal VFX Artist, you will:
* Create high-quality VFX from ideation, concept, and visual exploration through to final implementation in Unity.
* Design and implement gameplay, UI, environmental, feedback, and celebratory effects that support the game's visual direction.
* Bring your own creative ideas to the table and help shape how the project feels in motion.
* Work hands-on with modern Unity VFX workflows, including Particle System, Shader Graph, VFX Graph, URP, custom materials, and animation-driven effects.
* Translate concepts, art direction, prototypes, gameplay needs, and rough ideas into clear, polished in-engine effects.
* Own VFX implementation for features, collaborating closely with designers, artists, technical artists, and programmers.
* Optimize VFX for mobile, balancing visual ambition with performance, memory, readability, and production constraints.
* Identify VFX-related visual, technical, and workflow bottlenecks, and propose practical solutions.
* Help define VFX best practices, workflows, naming conventions, asset organization, and implementation standards.
* Collaborate with tech art and engineering on shaders, tools, profiling, and runtime performance.

Skills to create thrills

We are looking for a Principal VFX artist with strong artistic judgment, excellent craft skills, creative ownership, and deep hands-on experience creating effects in Unity.

You have a strong sense of timing, motion, composition, color, rhythm, and gameplay feedback. You understand how VFX can support player clarity, emotional impact, reward, and game feel.

You are not only an implementer. You are someone who can look at a feature, understand the emotional and gameplay intent, propose strong VFX ideas, and bring them to life in-engine.

You have:
* Significant experience creating real-time VFX for games, ideally for casual, mobile, or highly polished free-to-play titles.
* Strong hands-on experience making VFX directly in Unity.
* A strong portfolio showing high-quality in-game VFX from idea to final implementation.
* Ability to create VFX from early ideation, concept, mood boards, mockups, prototypes, or rough direction and turn them into polished in-engine results.
* Strong creative instincts and the ability to propose effects that improve game feel, readability, reward, and emotional impact.
* Strong understanding of mobile performance constraints and optimization techniques.
* Ability to troubleshoot visual bugs, sorting issues, and performance problems.
* Strong collaboration skills across art, design, technical art, engineering, and production.
* A proactive, organized, and self-driven approach to your work.

What makes you successful in this role

* You are not waiting for tasks to be assigned. You look at the game, understand what it needs, and help raise the bar.
* You are comfortable owning a feature's VFX from start to finish: shaping the idea, exploring the visual direction, implementing it in Unity, polishing it, and keeping stakeholders informed and aligned.
* You can explain your creative and technical choices clearly, take feedback well, and help the team make better visual decisions.
* Most importantly, you make the game feel better and the player feel rewarded.

Portfolio requirement

A portfolio in English is required.

Your portfolio should show strong examples of real-time VFX work, ideally including in-engine Unity implementation. We are especially interested in seeing examples that demonstrate experience in casual games, creative ownership, and your ability to take an effect from idea to final in-game result.

About King
With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world's most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile game hits such as Farm Heroes Saga. King games are played by more than 200 million monthly active users. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn, @lifeatking on Instagram, or @king_games on X