2K Games - Technical Art Graduate Program - Novato

Founded in 2005, 2K Games is a global video game company, publishing titles developed by some of the most influential game development studios in the world. Our studios responsible for developing 2K’s portfolio of world-class games across multiple platforms, include Visual Concepts, Firaxis, Hangar 13, CatDaddy, Cloud Chamber, and HB Studios. Our portfolio of titles is expanding due to our global strategic plan, building, and acquiring exciting studios whose content continues to inspire all of us! 2K publishes titles in today’s most popular gaming genres, including sports, shooters, action, role-playing, strategy, casual, and family entertainment.

Our team of engineers, marketers, artists, writers, data scientists, producers, problem solvers, and doers, are the professional publishing stewards of our growing library of critically acclaimed franchises such as NBA 2K, Battleborn, BioShock, Borderlands, PGA TOUR 2K, Mafia, Sid Meier’s Civilization, WWE 2K, and XCOM.

At 2K, we pride ourselves on creating an inclusive work environment, which means encouraging our teams to Come as You Are and do your best work! We are dedicated to diversity and inclusion and want our community of candidates to reflect this commitment. We encourage all qualified applicants to explore our global positions.

What is Technical Art?

Technical Artists make the art team more capable than it would be on its own. The art team is your customer, its problems set your priorities, and your work is judged on whether the artists it was built for actually use it.

In practice that means building the tools artists use to create content, the rigs that make characters move, the shaders that give a world its look, the rules that scatter a landscape with vegetation, and the pipelines that carry all of it into the game.

Program overview

21 months, starting Summer 2027, based in Novato.

Foundation Training. Eleven weeks.

You get a brief, a deadline, and the tools art teams use every day, and you work out how to deliver. You build across all four specializations, including the ones you are weakest in: Pipeline and Tools, Character and Animation, Rendering and Visuals, Environment and World. What you build is reviewed by people who do this for a living, and the review covers how you worked and how you talked to the people you built it for, not only what you delivered. Some of the work is yours alone and some is shared with the Engineering and Publishing graduates.

Foundation Training runs on Unreal Engine, Maya, Python, and Perforce. The program assumes you arrive knowing one or two of them, not all four.

Three strategic rotations, six months each.

Rotations run across our studios, including Hangar 13, HB Studios, Visual Concepts, Firaxis, Small Axe, and Gearbox, and across the central technology teams that build the tools and pipelines every studio shares. Which team you rotate onto is decided around game timelines, and what the teams need at the time, and your own developing focus is part of that conversation.

What we are looking for

An outstanding portfolio is the first thing we look at, and it should show the work and how you got there. It does not have to be an art portfolio. Tools, scripts, rigs, shaders all count. If the work was made with other people, tell us which parts were yours.

There are two things you need:

• Comfort in at least one content-creation package or game engine. Maya, Blender, Houdini, Substance, Unreal Engine, or whatever you happened to learn.
• Some scripting. It does not need to be much, but you should be able to read code and have written something.

Beyond that, the qualities that matter most:

• Curiosity. You want to know how things are made, and you dig in to find out.
• Persistence. A lot of this job is being stuck: something is broken, the reason is not obvious, and you keep going until you find it.
• Communication. You will spend more time talking and asking questions than most people expect.

Education. Game Art, Animation, VFX, Technical Art, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. We also take people with any unrelated degree who have a portfolio that shows the work. What you have made matters more to us than where you studied. The key is that you have a recent degree.

Experience. No games industry experience is needed. This is a graduate program, and it is built for people who have never worked in games. Mod work, game jams, university projects, and freelance work are all relevant experiences as far as we are concerned.

Recent graduates. Eligible Grads from January 2025 to June 2027 are eligible to apply. Exceptions may be made on a case-by-case basis if your grad date falls outside of these dates.

Technical Art is a job people arrive at from many directions, so apply even if you do not match every line above.

How to apply

Send a CV/resume and a portfolio. The portfolio can be an ArtStation page, a personal site, a GitHub profile, an itch.io page, a reel, or a PDF. Which platform it lives on matters much less than whether we can open it and follow what we are looking at. If your work is spread across several places, link all of them and tell us which one to start with. If your resume doesn't explicitly have Tech Art, you're welcome to create a cover letter for us to review telling us why you're interested in this program. Cover letters are entirely optional.

The pay range for this position in California at the start of employment is expected to be $105,000 USD/year. However, base pay offered is based on market location, and may vary further depending on individualized factors for job candidates, such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other objective business considerations.

Subject to those same considerations, the total compensation package for employees in regular roles may also include other elements, including a bonus and/or equity awards, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, provided that temporary or intern roles will not be eligible for many of these payments or benefits. Details of participation in compensation and benefit plans (if applicable) will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an "at-will position" and the company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation or benefit program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

#LI-Hybrid

As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to ensuring that qualified individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform their essential job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us if you need a reasonable accommodation.

Please note that 2K Games and its studios never use instant messaging apps or personal email accounts to contact prospective employees or conduct interviews and when emailing, recruiters only use 2K.com, take2games.com or zynga.com accounts.