Technical Artist - XR Rapid Prototyping

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Job Type: Contract
• Salary: Not Specified
• Location: Remote – able to work 10am – 7pm UK time
• Contract Duration: 5-6 months initial contract
• Start Date: July 2025

Nexus Studios is a global creative studio working with award-winning directors across animation, artful live-action, and immersive to redefine the boundaries of entertainment. Our work has received accolades from BAFTA, Emmy, Grammy, Academy Awards, and more. We work with the world’s leading cultural brands and have a deep-rooted history in innovation, XR, and crafted storytelling.

As a Technical Artist, you will be part of a compact, agile prototyping team tasked with developing a series of short-cycle, highly visual immersive demos. These demos are designed to excite and inspire future partners and audiences, being conceptually bold, technically inventive, and visually polished. You will bridge the gap between art and code, crafting shaders, real-time VFX, and creative tools that push the aesthetic fidelity of our prototypes. You will work closely with a Tech Lead and Senior Developer to ensure visual ambition meets real-time performance within fast-moving creative sprints.

Requirements

What You’ll Do:

• Drive the visual fidelity of immersive demos by creating real-time shaders, visual effects, and motion systems.
• Develop custom HLSL and GLSL shaders for use across native platforms and real-time engines.
• Contribute to rapid look-dev efforts, asset implementation, and visual prototyping in Unity, and porting them to GLSL for native Android pipelines.
• Collaborate with creative stakeholders to bring concept art, motion studies, and animation ideas into real-time execution.
• Optimize art and graphics systems for performance on XR devices while retaining creative intent.
• Build or adapt in-editor tools and visual pipelines to support fast iteration across the demo team.
• Identify visual opportunities and contribute creatively to the aesthetic direction of each prototype.

What You Will Bring:

• 5+ years of experience as a Technical Artist in games, XR, real-time graphics, or immersive installations.
• Expert-level experience with Unity, including asset workflows, scripting, and VFX systems.
• Strong shader development skills in both HLSL (Unity) and GLSL (native pipeline).
• A sharp eye for motion, lighting, material response, and visual design fundamentals.
• Experience integrating and optimizing real-time assets under performance constraints.
• A collaborative mindset with a passion for solving creative-technical challenges.
• Comfort working in a highly experimental, rapid-prototyping environment.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience working across both native and engine-based pipelines.
• Familiarity with AR/VR/XR development or spatial computing SDKs.
• Prior work in experiential design or visual R&D teams.
• Understanding of PBR workflows and mobile GPU performance tradeoffs.
• Scripting skills (e.g., C#, Python) for tool-building or workflow automation.
• Experience working with Blender/Houdini pipelines.

Company Information & Culture

Nexus Studios is proud to work with extraordinary talent as an equal opportunity employer. We embrace individuals of all backgrounds regardless of gender, race, age, abilities, or sexual preferences. Our recruitment process is merit-based, ensuring fair treatment to every applicant. This is a Nexus-led role designed for creative technologists with a visual bias—those who love using code to make things beautiful and surprising in real time. You’ll help define how the future looks and feels. If you love making immersive visuals come alive—and doing so quickly, collaboratively, and beautifully—let’s talk.

Additional Details

• Department: Experience Design
• Published: 2025-06-10