Character Artist Job Overview
| Role Title | Senior Character Artist (Stylized Games | Unity3D Mobile) |
| Company Name | High-Profile Co-Development Studio (Confidential Hiring) |
| Department | 3D Art Department |
| Location | Poznań, Poland, Europe (Fully Remote / European Union Only) |
| Core Collaboration Hours | 10:00 – 15:00 CET (Central European Time) |
| Job Type | Permanent, Full-Time |
| Contract Options | Flexible (B2B Contract or Standard Labor Employment) |
| Experience Level | Senior (5+ Years of Professional Experience) |
| Primary Software | Unity3D Engine, Blender, Maya, Substance Painter |
| Target Scale | AA and AAA Stylized Mobile & Hybrid Game Projects |
| Estimated Salary Range | €50,000 – €70,000 / year (B2B Remote) | 145,000 – 210,000 PLN / year (Local Poland Contract) Based on experience, localized tax brackets, and chosen contract type. |
| Perks & Benefits | Competitive compensation, guaranteed paid vacation, annual team retreats |
Position Overview
Beffio studio seeking a highly creative and technically accomplished Senior Character Artist with specialized experience in the Unity3D ecosystem and mobile platforms to join our global 3D Art Department. In this permanent, fully remote position, you will take on a vital leadership and production role, assuming responsibility for crafting high-quality, beautifully stylized character art that achieves uncompromising artistic excellence while executing flawlessly within strict mobile performance parameters.
This senior position is built for a professional who views game art through a holistic lens. You recognize that an incredible character asset is not just evaluated by its high-poly render, but by how cleanly it deforms during gameplay animations, how efficiently its textures are batched, and how minimally it impacts mobile hardware resources like battery consumption and thermal throttling.
Operating within a high-trust, collaborative, and decentralized studio landscape across Europe, you will have a direct hand in shaping the visual identity of ambitious AA and AAA stylized projects. You will act as a key bridge between conceptual art and technical execution, defining cross-discipline pipelines and establishing studio-wide quality benchmarks alongside an elite, cross-functional team.
Comprehensive Role Responsibilities
Your day-to-day duties combine world-class 3D character production, advanced technical integration inside the Unity engine, structural optimization, and peer mentorship.
1. Stylized Character Art Creation
- Hero Asset Production: Sculpt, model, retopologize, and texture stunning, gameplay-ready stylized characters, creatures, and complementary outfits that exhibit excellent silhouette design, expressive appeal, and immense personality.
- Stylized Texturing Mastery: Utilize Substance Painter or similar tools to author vibrant hand-painted, stylized PBR, or non-photorealistic (NPR) textures that translate perfectly across various real-time lighting scenarios.
- Anatomy & Form Manipulation: Push the boundaries of character form, utilizing a deep understanding of human and creature anatomy to create compelling, readable stylization that retains structural integrity.
2. Deep Unity3D Engine Integration
- Asset Onboarding & Setup: Import and completely configure character models directly within the Unity3D editor. Take absolute ownership of material assignments, custom shader applications, level of detail (LOD) setups, and specific character lighting behavior.
- Cross-Department Collaboration: Partner directly with animation and technical art teams to validate that mesh topology and blend shapes function flawlessly with established gameplay rigs and dynamic deformation systems.
- In-Engine Troubleshooting: Proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve visual artifacts, clipping issues, draw-call spikes, or shader errors directly within active Unity test scenes.
3. Optimization, Architecture & Pipeline Definition
- Mobile-First Infrastructure: Design and uphold rigid technical art standards for 3D character content targeted at mobile and performance-constrained devices, actively managing memory footprints, vertex budgets, draw calls, and fill-rate limits.
- Pipeline Standardization: Create, maintain, and document explicit best-practice guides detailing texture atlasing strategies, uniform texel density, custom shader graph configurations, and organized prefab structures.
- Tooling Evolution: Collaborate directly with technical artists and tool programmers to audit existing workflows, providing constructive feedback to develop custom scripts, automation modules, or plugins that accelerate the character production line.
4. Leadership, Communication & Mentorship
- Cross-Discipline Alignment: Work hand-in-hand with game designers, animators, tech artists, and software programmers to smoothly resolve design requirements and technical hardware bottlenecks.
- Artistic Quality Gates: Conduct constructive, detail-oriented peer reviews and provide actionable feedback to other artists on the team, ensuring the entire project conforms to established technical rules and artistic direction.
- Documentation Stewardship: Maintain studio asset documentation, instituting clean naming conventions, directory architectures, and unified quality benchmarks that withstand the scaling demands of live-service development.
Candidate Requirements & Qualifications
Required Professional Experience
- Industry Longevity: A minimum of 5+ years of verified professional experience operating as a dedicated 3D character artist within a professional game studio environment.
- Shipped Credits: Proven history of developing and shipping stylized game content, with a strong preference given to individuals who have carried stylized titles through a complete lifecycle on Unity3D and mobile platforms.
- Elite Portfolio: A comprehensive, elite portfolio highlighting a diverse array of real-time, stylized character assets. Your portfolio must clearly exhibit your wireframe topology flow, UV layout packing, texture maps, and how the assets render cleanly in a real-time game engine.
Core Artistic & Technical Skills
- Aesthetic Mastery: Exceptional mastery of form, weight, value contrast, color harmony, color theory, and visual readability within stylized properties.
- Mobile Constraint Literacy: Deep, practical knowledge of the exact hardware limitations that impact characters on mobile chipsets, including texture batching, vertex shading overhead, and draw-call management.
- Industry Standard Software: Complete professional mastery of modern production suites, such as Blender or Autodesk Maya, coupled with expert-level proficiency in Substance Painter or equivalent texture authoring applications.
- Unity Literacy: Direct, hands-on experience navigating Unity’s internal workflows (import pipelines, materials, prefab architecture, and basic engine performance profiling tools).
Mindset & Remote Competency
- Solution-Oriented Attitude: A proactive problem-solver who balances artistic perfectionism with technical discipline, demonstrating high attention to detail across both fields.
- Communication Fluidity: Flawless written and spoken English skills, with a demonstrated ability to articulate complex technical constraints or artistic notes clearly inside an agile, remote production framework.
- EU Alignment: Must be physically based within the European Union (or holding independent, pre-existing EU work authorization) and capable of maintaining presence during our core collaboration window of 10:00 to 15:00 CET.
Bonus Skills & Desirable Attributes
While not strictly mandatory, candidates who bring any of the following technical skill sets will stand out significantly during our selection process:
- Prior professional experience formalizing mentorship pathways or acting as a designated lead for junior/mid-level character artists.
- Practical familiarity or active experimentation with Unity’s Shader Graph, custom HLSL shader writing, or post-processing configuration to achieve distinctive stylized rendering (e.g., cell-shading, ink outlines).
- Experience leveraging procedural generation platforms or automated asset preparation tools (such as Houdini, specialized scripting, or automated LOD decimation software) to accelerate high-volume art workflows.
- Long-standing experience working successfully within distributed, highly mature, fully remote game development teams.
What We Offer
- Ambition & Impact: Direct involvement on premier, creatively distinct stylized AA and AAA game projects backed by significant technical and artistic resources.
- Secure Corporate Infrastructure: A stable, long-term full-time career path built on a rock-solid studio foundation. We accommodate your personal tax and corporate preferences by offering flexible contract layouts, including localized labor employment agreements or high-tier global B2B contracts.
- High Creative & Technical Agency: A high-trust production environment where your insights directly shape studio-wide mobile character art standards, technical workflows, and pipeline optimizations.
- Refined Remote Culture: A true remote-first workplace that respects your deep-work windows. By consolidating core collaboration hours into a focused midday block (10:00 – 15:00 CET), we minimize meeting fatigue and emphasize asynchronous efficiency.
- Holistic Benefits: Competitive financial compensation paired with guaranteed paid vacation time to ensure you stay physically refreshed and creatively inspired.
- Annual Studio Retreats: Fully covered annual team retreats designed to gather our European teams together in person, focusing on overarching studio alignment, collective technical learning, and real human team bonding.
Application Instructions
To keep our review pipeline efficient and highly focused on your craft, we do not require a formal cover letter.
To apply for this Senior position, please compile and submit the following:
1. direct link to your current 3D character art portfolio / ArtStation profile.
2. brief written note (under 300 words) describing a specific stylized character you built that required intensive optimization for mobile hardware. Please outline the exact technical tricks (e.g., unique texturing strategies, topology choices) you used to preserve visual appeal without breaking the target performance budget.
