Technical UE Engineer, Visual Polish & Art Integration

About the role

Hidden Acorn is a new game studio based in the San Francisco Bay Area building our first title: a competitive, PvP real-time strategy game launching across all major platforms. We're a small, ambitious team and we are looking for talented, passionate people who'll build it with us from the ground up. Hidden Acorn is looking for a technically-minded graphics engineer to own the pipeline between raw art assets and what players actually see on screen. This is not a pure art role or a pure engine programming role. You'll work closely with our artists to get assets looking their best, from materials and lighting to post-process and VAT/ISM rendering, and you'll be the person who knows why something looks wrong and exactly how to fix it. If you read shader code as comfortably as you tweak material parameters and can write tooling to eliminate a tedious pipeline step, this role was built for you.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with artists to receive skeletal mesh, texture, and material source assets and ensure they render correctly and efficiently in engine
• Author and iterate on Unreal materials, including material instances, parameter collections, and layered materials, to meet our visual and performance targets
• Set up and tune post-process volumes, lighting rigs, and environment atmospherics across game maps
• Maintain and extend our VAT and ISM rendering pipeline to support large unit counts efficiently
• Build and maintain asset import and bake scripts in Python, Blender, or similar tools to reduce manual steps for the art team
• Profile GPU performance, identify bottlenecks such as overdraw, shader complexity, and texture bandwidth, and implement fixes
• Write clear documentation and keep our asset pipeline conventions current and accessible

Requirements

• 2 to 3 years of hands-on Unreal Engine work in a shipped or near-shipped project
• Solid understanding of the Unreal material system, including the practical difference between world-space and tangent-space normals and when it matters
• Comfortable reading and writing HLSL or modifying custom expressions in the material graph
• Familiar with standard PBR workflows: roughness/metallic, channel-packed masks, normal maps, and emissive
• Experience with at least one DCC tool at a pipeline level, such as Blender, Maya, Houdini, or Substance
• Ability to read C++ at a level sufficient to trace a rendering bug through engine source; writing production C++ is a plus, not a requirement
• Strong communicator who can bridge the gap between engineers and artists clearly and efficiently
• Experience with VAT or GPU-driven crowd rendering
• Python scripting for asset automation using Unreal's Python API or standalone tools
• RTS or strategy game background
• Familiarity with mobile and scalability concerns; we have a tablet-first roadmap

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