Director, Art Direction - Unpublished R&D Product

Art Directors at Riot drive the quality and performance of their team, establishing direction and goals that provide clarity and focus. Your scope of responsibilities include leading with vision, strategic partnership across the game, a deep understanding of audience resonance, overall team culture and performance, growth of your direct reports, and directing your team on successful execution of your vision and strategy.

As an Art Director an unpublished R&D product, you will help bring the game’s visual direction to life in a new game for players around the world. You will translate our creative direction into a distinctive, emotionally compelling, production-ready visual identity that supports gameplay, strengthens character appeal, and meets the craft bar players expect from Riot.

You will partner closely with Creative Direction, Game Leadership, cross-disciplinary teams, and external partners to translate the game’s visual ambition into a cohesive, art direction.

Responsibilities:

• Steward the game’s visual identity from concept through production
• Translate creative direction into clear visual standards, production practices, and scalable art workflows
• Drive visual quality, appeal, and gameplay readability across all player-facing art
• Apply deep expertise in the art style across art, animation, VFX, visual storytelling, and character-driven experiences
• Balance artistic ambition with technical requirements and production realities
• Build, lead, and mentor high-performing internal and external art teams
• Direct co-development partners, vendors, and distributed creative talent to deliver consistently high-quality work
• Partner across design, narrative, audio, engineering, product, and IP to ensure art strengthens the player experience
• Provide clear visual feedback through reviews, paintovers, references, and development guidance
• Maintain deep awareness of the art style, creative influences, and evolving player expectations
• Required Qualifications: 12+ years of experience developing games, with 8+ years leading art teams
• Experience as an Art Director or key artistic decision maker on at least one shipped 3D game
• Experience delivering games with strong character appeal in both model and animation
• Strong understanding of the pipelines, production techniques, and technical constraints required to deliver stylized visuals in games
• Strong artistic judgment across character design, composition, shape language, color, lighting, animation, VFX, and gameplay readability
• Experience balancing visual quality against technical, production, platform, and team-size constraints
• Experience building, leading, mentoring, and aligning art teams across cross-functional game development
• Experience directing external vendors or distributed art teams
• Champion of healthy creative processes that support iteration, alignment, scalable production, and strong artistic quality
• Experience leveraging emerging technologies and workflows, to accelerate visual development while maintaining artistic quality, authorship, and creative integrity
• A portfolio demonstrating strong artistic judgment, visual clarity, compositional skill, and stylistic range
• Experience developing games in modern game engines (i.e. Unreal, Unity, etc)
• Desired Qualifications: Experience developing art direction for live-service, multiplayer, or other technically constrained games
• Experience with 3D games that place high demands on character appeal, animation, VFX, camera, gameplay readability, or combat clarity
• Working knowledge of stylized rendering techniques, VFX, animation, and visual clarity for gameplay
• For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise and a collaborative spirit that prioritizes the delight of players. We will look at your past studies and experience, but for this role, we also look for dedicated people with a personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this is the role for you!
• Our Perks: Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our