Blackbird Interactive

Role Description Blackbird Interactive is looking for a passionate and experienced Lighting Artist to join our team and continue developing a AAA Sci-fi action title. In this position, you’ll be working under the supervision of an Art Director and Lead Environment Artist. You’ll collaborate closely with art, design, and tech teams to craft cinematic lighting that supports gameplay, creates immersive spaces, and enhances environmental storytelling while working within real-time constraints. This role focuses on real-time lighting, composition, mood, and visual consistency, helping teams achieve cinematic environments while keeping scenes performant and production-friendly. Responsibilities - Work under the direction of Art Leadership to maintain artistic consistency through lighting standards and workflows as well as adhere to established IP’s aesthetic guidelines. - Communicate with the Art Leadership and environment team concerning lighting needs and direction. - Use proprietary engine’s built-in lighting tools to produce stunning, cinematic lighting schemes for a range of environments. - Optimize lighting setups, shadows, post-processing, and related systems for real-time performance. - Troubleshoot and resolve lighting, rendering, and visual clarity issues while maintaining artistic intent. - Create and maintain documentation for lighting workflows, standards, and best practices. Qualifications - Experience lighting environments and scenes within real-time game engines such as Unity or Unreal. - Strong understanding of lighting theory, color space, exposure, and physically based natural lighting. - Insight into cinematography and dramaturgy, scene blocking, and lighting to set different moods. - Solid understanding of real-time rendering principles and physically based rendering (PBR) workflows. - Experience working with post-processing, exposure, atmospheric effects, and lighting optimization techniques. - Ability to balance artistic quality with technical and gameplay requirements. - Familiarity with modern game art pipelines and collaboration across multidisciplinary teams. - Highly detail-oriented, technically inclined with strong communication skills and a collaborative, team-oriented mindset. Pluses - Passion for grounded, immersive science fiction. - Experience with proprietary engines. - Knowledge of performance profiling and optimization related to lighting and rendering. - Previous cinematic lighting experience. Salary $75,000 - $90,000 a year

• Working as the embedded TA on a Proprietary Engine • Performing Optimisation work and improving framerate stability • Coming up with quality solutions within technical constraints • Providing the animation, modeling, texturing and FX team with TA and implementation support • Performing with minimum supervision, working well in a small team, and taking ownership for problems whilst collaborating towards solutions • Acting as a bridge between Art, Engineering and the game engine • Authoring understandable documentation for tool and production pipelines

• Provide animations for characters, creatures, weapons, and props that are immersive and in-line with the IP’s visual and gameplay style. • Implement animation states and events using tools provided in a proprietary game engine. • Collaborate with tech art to create new rigs and find creative solutions to problems as they arise. • Be comfortable owning your pipeline from animation set creation to in-engine implementation. • You will communicate updates in a timely fashion and collaborate effectively cross-discipline with minimal supervision. • Find creative solutions to make best reuse of existing animations.

Role Description Blackbird Interactive is seeking a passionate Art Lead to join our team on an upcoming third-person action shooter. Do you have a broad range of creative and technical experience building worlds and levels in Unreal Engine 5? Are you skilled at creating art under a strong technical brief? If so, we’d love to hear from you! At BBI, you’ll join a fast-moving team developing a third-person action game. We support remote and hybrid working arrangements across Canada. At BBI, you’ll find a flexible, forward-thinking environment where creative voices are valued and nurtured. Please include a link to your portfolio with your CV. Responsibilities - Maintain an Art Vision established by the external partner whilst driving new content and features. - Control character-driven technical pipelines, as well as content for environment assets and kits. - Collaborate with production to ensure the product stays on time and on budget to the highest quality. - Create and drive visual targets that set the vision & quality bar for art in-engine. - Delegate and direct responsibilities where needed, and proactively seek out and present solutions to problems. - Give clear and consistent communication (and feedback) to the development team and external partners throughout production. Sell the Art Direction to all invested parties. - Collaborate with the Game leadership team to deliver a world-class addition to a popular indie franchise, and work with production to ensure the product stays on time and on budget. - Help mentor and grow artists to improve in their thinking, process, and craft. Inspire the art team to deliver consistent quality across all art disciplines. - Collaborate with studio art leadership to grow and maintain an inspiring art culture, and participate in hiring and maintaining the best talent in the industry. - Drive all disciplines within the Art Department, including stylisation and optimisation approaches for VFX and Tech Art. Qualifications - 5+ years of extensive games industry art experience. - 2+ years preferred as an Art Lead (or Director). - Experience with both Console and PC releases. - Unreal 4 or 5 experience. - Demonstrable ability to drive art pipelines and achieve results. - Expresses passion and strong skills in both 2D and 3D art. - Communicate an eagerness for playing current popular games and understanding the art direction decisions. Requirements - $98,000 - $125,000 a year.

Level Artist (8-month contract) Vancouver, BC, Canada Art – Art / Temporary Full-Time / Remote Blackbird Interactive is a creative-fueled, future-driven, independent game studio where the best talent in the industry can find long-term careers to help grow their abilities while working on a wide range of projects, which encompass world-class IPs as well as our own creations across multiple genres. Our studio operates as a remote-first workplace, offering flexible work arrangements. At this time, we are only able to hire candidates who are legally eligible to work in Canada and reside within Canada. Blackbird Interactive is seeking a passionate Level Artist to join our team and continue developing a AAA Sci-fi action title. In this position, you’ll be working under the supervision of an Art Director and Art Lead. You’ll use your compositional skills and passion for environmental storytelling to bring narrative depth to a variety of spaces through thoughtful prop placement. You’ll collaborate closely with art leadership as well as work cross-discipline to ensure levels and locations meet gameplay and narrative requirements. Responsibilities - Work under the direction of Art Leadership to maintain artistic consistency and adhere to established IP’s aesthetic guidelines. - Create narratively compelling environments with prop placement. - Work collaboratively with designers and lighting artists, as well as other members of the art team, to ensure levels are built cleanly and efficiently. - Employ creative re-use of existing assets and materials to drastically and efficiently alter the look and feel spaces. - Establish and maintain a cohesive environment style, with an eye towards detail and an understanding of technical requirements and limitations. Requirements - 3+ years of experience as level artist in-engine - Strong portfolio showcasing work on previous titles or projects in-engine - Desire to be highly collaborative and eager to take constructive feedback - Great sense of scale, proportion and composition - An eye for detail and excellent communication skills - Passion for environmental storytelling Pluses - Passion for grounded, immersive science fiction - Experience working in proprietary engines - Solid grasp of PBR workflows using Substance Painter and/or Designer - Proficiency in hard-surface modeling software such as Maya, Blender, Plasticity or equivalent, modern authoring tools $80,000 - $90,000 a year

• Test software for functionality, reliability, and/or performance. • Report bugs and defects into an online database, ensuring that all necessary information is included and easy to understand. Including tracking game stability and performance. • Contribute to the overall test planning, by creating, running and scheduling Test Scripts for your assigned game area(s). • Effectively communicate the status of your assigned game area(s) to both Internal and External Production & Development teams. • Perform risk analysis and escalate issues to QA management when necessary. • Work embedded with the development team alongside functionality testing. • Participate in review of requirements and designs, communicating concerns and/or risks to project stakeholders. • Provide daily status updates and trends to QA leadership, production and development teams. • Senior Quality Assurance Analyst is expected to be responsible for an entire game/scrum area.

• Core RTS gameplay systems: Design, implement, maintain, and improve player-facing gameplay features such as unit behaviors, abilities, commands, selection, movement, combat interactions, targeting, and game-state systems using C++. • Mission and scenario gameplay: Build and support scripted gameplay content including triggers, objectives, events, encounters, victory conditions, progression logic, and campaign or custom scenario systems. • Simulation and systems architecture: Develop modular, data-driven gameplay systems that support iteration, determinism, save/load reliability, multiplayer stability, and maintainability across a large legacy codebase. • Technical leadership and collaboration: Partner closely with design, art, audio, production, QA, and engineering peers to prototype features, tune game feel, guide implementation approaches, review code, and resolve gameplay issues efficiently. • Performance and stability: Debug and optimize gameplay systems with attention to CPU, memory, desync risk, determinism, save/load issues, and edge-case behavior in both single-player and multiplayer contexts. • Legacy stewardship and improvement: Work within an established codebase to extend and refactor existing systems, modernize workflows where appropriate, reduce technical debt, and preserve the responsiveness and readability players expect from a classic RTS experience.

• Serve as the first point of contact for employee HR inquiries and provide support across the employee lifecycle, including onboarding, role changes, and offboarding • Prepare and maintain HR documentation such as offer letters, employment changes, and verification letters • Maintain employee records, staff trackers, and HR systems to ensure accurate and up-to-date information • Support payroll processes by coordinating employee changes with Finance • Administer BambooHR, including employee data updates, job and manager changes, and workflow management • Support onboarding and offboarding processes within HR systems • Generate HR reports and assist with general administrative and year-end tasks • Coordinate employee benefits enrollments, terminations, and changes • Manage and track PTO, sick leave, and other leaves within BambooHR • Provide administrative support for recruitment

• Prototype, implement, and iterate on gameplay content such as game flow, interactable objects and player abilities, event hooks for narrative and audio content, scripted sequences, tutorial/help systems, and bug fixing. • Collaborate with both artists and designers on ways to improve the game content implementation to take advantage of existing technology and drive to the best end result possible. • Collaborate with engineers to improve design workflows and bring gameplay intentions to life while respecting performance and technical constraints • Work with producers and team leadership to assess requirements and provide effort estimates and updates to help ensure the team reaches its goals successfully

• Oversee one or more cross-discipline feature teams. • Establish and maintain team schedules, evaluating and assessing capacity on a daily basis, proactively assessing and mitigating risk. • Manage resource requirements, establish dependencies and balance priorities. • Partner with technical and creative leadership to ensure project vision, deliverables and goals are clear. • Maintain regular communication with the project team and coordinate dependencies with stakeholders. • Manage scope and quality, proactively assess and mitigate risk