This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Lighting Artist (7-month contract) based in Canada.

This role focuses on shaping high-impact, cinematic lighting for immersive game environments across a diverse range of projects and intellectual properties. You will help define the visual mood, readability, and emotional tone of real-time scenes while ensuring strong alignment with established art direction. Working closely with Art Leadership, you will contribute to the overall visual identity of gameplay spaces and narrative moments. The environment is highly collaborative, blending artistic craft with technical execution inside a modern game production pipeline. You will be responsible for balancing visual fidelity with performance constraints in a real-time engine. This is a hands-on role where your lighting work directly influences player experience and world immersion. It also includes mentoring responsibilities and contributing to shared lighting standards across the team.

In this role, you will take ownership of lighting execution and contribute to the overall visual direction of game environments while ensuring consistency with established artistic standards and IP guidelines. You will collaborate closely with leadership and cross-functional teams to create emotionally compelling and technically optimized real-time lighting setups.

• Develop and maintain high-quality, cinematic lighting setups across multiple environments, ensuring strong composition, mood, and visual clarity
• Collaborate with Art Leadership to define lighting direction and support the creation of immersive visual storytelling experiences
• Apply lighting theory, color, exposure, and physically based rendering principles to achieve realistic and stylized results
• Optimize lighting systems, shadows, post-processing, and related elements to meet real-time performance requirements
• Troubleshoot and resolve lighting, rendering, and visibility issues while preserving artistic intent
• Document lighting workflows, standards, and best practices to support team consistency and scalability
• Provide mentorship and actionable feedback to other lighting team members, supporting skill development and pipeline efficiency

This role requires strong professional experience in real-time lighting for games, combined with a deep understanding of both artistic principles and technical constraints. You should be comfortable working in collaborative production environments and contributing to both creative direction and implementation.

• 5+ years of experience in lighting environments and scenes within a game production pipeline
• Strong understanding of lighting theory, color space, exposure, and physically based lighting workflows
• Solid grasp of cinematography principles including composition, mood, staging, and visual storytelling
• Experience working with real-time rendering systems and optimizing lighting for performance
• Familiarity with post-processing effects, atmospheric systems, and rendering optimization techniques
• Ability to balance artistic quality with gameplay, technical, and performance requirements
• Experience working within modern game pipelines and multidisciplinary team environments
• Strong communication skills, attention to detail, and a collaborative mindset
• Bonus: experience with proprietary engines, cinematic lighting work, or performance profiling

• Competitive compensation for a 7-month contract role
• Remote-first work environment with flexible arrangements across Canada
• Opportunity to work on high-profile IPs and original game projects
• Collaborative, creative studio culture focused on artistic excellence and innovation
• Exposure to advanced real-time rendering and modern game development pipelines
• Opportunity to mentor and influence lighting standards across production teams
• Work on visually ambitious projects with strong artistic direction and creative ownership