As a Principal Technical Artist on the Game Studio Tech Lab team at Netflix, you will join a small, senior-leaning group of multi-talented game engineers, designers, and artists to build experimental games that validate new technologies. Your day-to-day responsibilities include driving performance optimization across CPU, GPU, and bandwidth budgets, profiling bottlenecks in rendering and asset streaming, and establishing best practices for emerging platforms. You will also prototype visual opportunities with shifting technologies, create high-quality game assets, and develop efficient art pipelines using tools like Maya and Substance. Deep expertise in Unity3D and Unreal Engine is essential, along with strong coding skills in languages such as C# or HLSL. This role requires a track record of senior-level technical leadership in AAA games development and the ability to mentor cross-discipline teams on performance optimization.
Drive runtime and memory performance across CPU, GPU, and bandwidth budgets.
Profile and resolve bottlenecks in rendering, shaders, animation, asset streaming, and content pipelines.
Identify new opportunities to incorporate technology and unlock creative possibilities.
Architect and maintain art pipelines and tools for optimized content creation.
Create game assets with a high degree of technical capability and optimization.
What we're looking for
10+ years experience as a technical artist with senior-level leadership in AAA, casual, or mobile games.
Deep expertise in performance optimization across rendering, shaders, memory, and asset pipelines.
Fluency with profiling tools like RenderDoc, PIX, Nsight, Unity Profiler, and Unreal Insights for concrete improvements.
Strong art skills including 3D graphics, VFX, modeling, shaders, texturing, and lighting for games.
Experience building games on early or constrained platforms where optimization enables creative vision.
Expertise in multiple game engine technologies like Unity3D and Unreal Engine, with knowledge of their rendering pipelines.
Market check
Salary context
This
$310,000–$520,000
range sits above
98%
of similar postings on FindRole.
Peer median band
$150,950–$226,450
Median floor and ceiling across peers.
Typical midpoint (25–75%)
$159,950–$236,525
Middle half of comparable postings.
Based on 240 comparable postings.*
* 240 is the maximum number of comparable postings sampled.
Employer
About Netflix
Netflix is the world''s leading streaming entertainment service, offering a vast library of TV series, films, documentaries, and original content to subscribers in over 190 countries. Industry: Streaming Entertainment & Media
Netflix currently has
91 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$388,000–$610,000
across 87 roles with salary data.
Us, Ca, Santa Clara, US122 days ago
$168,000–$264,500
PyTorch
CUDA
GPU
NVIDIA
Distributed Training
Deep Learning
Image Generation
Video Generation
Graphics
Computer Vision
Neural Rendering
Synthetic Data
Real-time Engines
Data Pipelines
Large Models
Multi-GPU Clusters
Low-Precision Training
Pruning
Distillation