Environment Art Lead

About Believer

There are many things that make Believers who we are, but our defining characteristic is an unwavering dedication to the player experience. We believe that player-first development is critical for games, esports, and all forms of media. We are not just a game company, we are a company for Gamers. We believe that collaboration and diverse thought drive innovation, and we foster a development culture around that principle.

The art team at Believer has one goal: to create a beautiful and fun playground for our players. We create stunning visuals that transport our players to other worlds and give them an exciting, dynamic battlefield to play on.

Role Overview

We are seeking an Environment Art Lead who is, first and foremost, an environment artist. This is a hands-on role: roughly 75% of your time goes to building the world — biomes, architecture, set dressing, materials, and the hero spaces that define what our co-op, open-world game looks like in Unreal Engine 5. The remaining 25% goes to leading the environment discipline on a small team: translating the Game Art Director's vision into standards, giving style guidance and feedback, and owning the pipeline from concept to engine.

The ideal candidate has a strong understanding of stylized art direction, a hunger to understand how a game plays (not just what it looks like), and the judgment to know when to raise the bar and when to ship.

What You'll Do

• Create final-quality environment assets and scenes in Unreal Engine 5 — modular architecture kits, props, terrain, foliage, materials, and lighting — from blockout through polish, and set the bar for the rest of the team.

• Collaborate with the Game Art Director, Concept Artists, and other game leads to ensure environment art aligns with the project's overall visual direction and creative vision.

• Provide regular, specific style guidance and feedback to environment artists, keeping their work coherent with the art direction and with each other, and review environment assets to ensure they meet quality standards.

• Represent environment art in planning: scope work with production, flag risk early, and make tradeoffs between ambition and delivery visible.

• Manage the Environment Art team and coordinate with outsourcing or freelance partners, helping to hire and onboard as the team grows.

• Stay up to date with industry trends and advancements in environment art, particularly around generative AI, and recommend new techniques or tools that could improve quality and efficiency.

What You'll Need

• 6+ years of experience in environment art creation for games, with at least one shipped title where you owned significant environment work end to end.

• A portfolio that shows both range and control: stylized environments with strong composition, material read, and lighting — not just isolated props. In-engine work and breakdowns strongly preferred.

• Deep Unreal Engine experience: level building, material editor, Lumen/Nanite-era lighting and performance considerations, and a working understanding of how art decisions affect the frame budget.

• Strong proficiency in industry-standard 2D or 3D software such as Photoshop, ZBrush, Substance Painter and Designer, and Maya, Blender, or 3DS Max. Modular kit-building and trim-sheet workflows should be second nature.

• Excellent communication, mentorship, and collaboration skills, and comfort working remotely and asynchronously across time zones with a few hours of daily overlap to US Pacific.

• Small-team experience, where you wore multiple hats and made scope calls without a playbook.