Senior Technical Artist, VFX & Interaction Systems - Social VR

Location: North America Remote / Hybrid in San Francisco preferred
Type: Contract-to-hire, , 4-month contract period
Start Date: Immediate
Compensation: $75 – $125 USD/hour depending on experience, availability, location, and scope. This is a contract-to-hire role, with potential to convert to full-time.

About Us

Vinci Games (YC S22) is a Y Combinator backed startup building the next generation of social virtual reality games.

Our newest title, Ruffnauts, is a Pokémon-inspired social multiplayer VR game for kids where players ride collectible pets, explore alien worlds, hatch and upgrade companions, uncover secrets, and play with friends. It launched in Alpha on Meta Quest and has already grown to 61K+ reviews, making it the tenth highest-rated VR game of all time.

Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, reached over 1M installs and maintains a 4.9-star rating across 23,000+ reviews and is the 33rd highest rated game on Meta Quest. Vinci Games was also selected as a 2026 Game Changer by GamesBeat, Nasdaq, Lightspeed, and industry judges as one of the Top 25 most innovative startups reshaping gaming and interactive media.

We’re backed by Y Combinator, Makers Fund, and Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, with team experience from CD Projekt RED, Oculus, Unity, Google, and Downpour Interactive.

We’re a small, fast-moving, remote team with a rare combination of traction, ambition, and creative freedom. We build through rapid iteration, close contact with players, and bold creative swings on one of gaming’s most exciting new platforms.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on Senior Technical Artist to own the VFX, pet animation polish, shaders, rigging, IK, cosmetics, diegetic UI, and technical art implementation for Ruffnauts.

This is not a pure tools role or pipeline consultant role. You will personally build, implement, optimize, and ship player-facing art systems in Unity for a fast-moving social VR game on Meta Quest.

This is a highly player-facing role: your work will be visible every time a player rides a pet, grabs an object, summons a creature, equips a cosmetic, or interacts with the world.

Your work will touch pets, avatars, cosmetics, in-world interaction feedback, gameplay VFX, prefab setup, live ops content tooling, and performance. The ideal candidate is a technical art generalist who can move quickly, make practical tradeoffs, and help the game feel more polished, readable, magical, and performant in headset.

Contract-to-Hire Path: This is a contract-to-hire role with an initial 4-month contract period. We’ll have a 30-day ramp check-in and a conversion discussion around the 90-day mark. Depending on mutual fit, performance, business needs, and agreement on final terms, we may convert to full-time, extend the contract, or conclude the engagement at the end of the initial term. If fit is clear earlier, we’re open to converting sooner.

What You’ll Do

• Create, implement, and optimize stylized VFX for pets, movement, battling, summoning, petting, healing, recall, creature interactions, gameplay systems, terrain obstacles, and environmental interactables
• Polish pet animation, movement feedback, interaction timing, and in-game readability so pets feel responsive, expressive, and satisfying in VR
• Create practical quality gates for player-facing content, including asset validation checks, naming and folder conventions, prefab structure standards, Quest performance budgets, and “ready to ship” checklists.
• Set up and polish IK, avatar hands, grab points, hand poses, finger poses, finger rotation, sockets, and object interaction poses so held items feel natural in VR
• Create and standardize UI/UX and in-world interaction feedback for interfaces, interactables, prompts, feedback states, shops, and player-facing systems
• Build shaders and materials using Unity Shader Graph, Amplify Shader Editor, or equivalent workflows
• Implement characters, pets, props, animated cosmetics, rewards, and interactables in Unity
• Build clean prefabs using existing scripts, animations, VFX, SFX, colliders, sockets, and gameplay hooks
• Make sure cosmetics work properly with avatars, hands, shops, previews, pickups, and player expression systems
• Optimize shaders, VFX, rigs, 3D assets, 2D assets, UI, materials, textures, and prefabs for Meta Quest performance
• Collaborate with artists, engineers, designers, and animators to turn rough ideas into shippable in-game systems
• Help define reusable standards for VFX, shaders, rigging, IK, cosmetics, prefabs, and art implementation
• Build and maintain lightweight Unity/C# tools, editor utilities, and automation where useful to reduce manual setup, prevent common asset errors, and make repeated content publishing faster and more reliable.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional technical art experience in games
• Strong Unity experience
• Strong experience with Unity Particle System, Shader Graph, Amplify Shader Editor, or similar tools
• Strong understanding of real-time rendering and Meta Quest optimization across 3D assets, 2D assets, VFX, UI, materials, shaders, textures, and prefabs
• Experience shipping content for VR, Meta Quest, mobile, or another constrained real-time platform
• Experience implementing and debugging game-ready prefabs, assets, VFX, shaders, and interaction feedback in Unity
• Experience with at least one of: rigging, skinning, IK, hand poses, sockets, constraints, or procedural animation systems
• Ability to create stylized, readable, performant VFX that support gameplay clarity
• Comfortable working hands-on in a small, fast-moving team
• Portfolio or reel showing technical art work, VFX, shaders, rigging, implementation, or shipped real-time content

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with Gorilla Tag-style VR games, social VR games, or arm-swinging locomotion games
• Experience with creature-collection games, pet games, social games, or expressive character-driven worlds
• Experience with stylized VFX for creatures, abilities, movement, combat, rewards, or player feedback
• Experience with diegetic UI, spatial UI, VR interaction feedback, or in-world UX
• Experience with cosmetics, avatar systems, equippables, wearables, shop previews, or player expression systems
• Experience with Blender, Maya, Houdini, Substance Painter, ZBrush, or procedural art workflows
• Experience with animation retargeting, facial animation, blendshapes, or runtime animation systems
• Passion for VR, social games, movement games, creature collection, stylized worlds, or player expression

Why Us

At Vinci Games, you’ll have the opportunity to help define the feel, readability, and moment-to-moment polish of a breakout social VR game at a rare stage: early enough that your systems and execution can meaningfully shape the product, but proven enough that real players are already showing up.

As our Senior Technical Artist, you won’t just support art from the sidelines. You’ll help bring Ruffnauts’ pets, interactions, cosmetics, abilities, terrain obstacles, and player-facing systems to life through gameplay VFX, animation implementation, IK, shaders, diegetic UI, and in-engine polish. Your work will directly influence how the game feels in headset: how pets move, how abilities read, how players grab and interact with objects, how cosmetics fit, and how magical the world feels to kids and teens.

We move quickly, test ideas in headset, learn from real player behavior, and make practical creative decisions under real VR constraints. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants ownership, creative impact, and the chance to help build a distinctive social VR world with strong gameplay feel, technical execution, and player-facing polish.