Senior Technical Artist, VFX & Interaction Systems - Social VR
at Vinci Games — Creating genre-defining multiplayer VR games.
What the role involves
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 existin
What they ask for
About Vinci Games
Vinci Games (YC S22) is building the next generation of social multiplayer VR games. Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, became one of the highest-rated sports games on Meta Quest with a passionate global community and critical acclaim. Our second title, Ruffnauts, is already one of the fastest growing F2P releases of 2025 on Meta Quest, with 30K+ reviews at 4.9 stars in its first month of Alpha Early Access. Ruffnauts combines creature catching, chaotic physics, and Gorilla Tag style locomotion into a groundbreaking VR adventure. The company is led by CEO Nathaniel Ventura (ex-Oculus, Google, Meta) and CTO Maciej Szcześnik, former lead gameplay designer at CD Projekt Red for The Witcher series. Our mission is to create genre-defining VR experiences that bring millions of players together.
Full Vinci Games profile