Lead 3D Artist - Social VR

Location: North America Remote / Hybrid in San Francisco preferred
Type: Contract-to-hire, 4-month contract period
Start Date: Immediate
Compensation: $50 – $100 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 is building the next generation of social virtual reality experiences.

Our newest title, Ruffnauts, is a Pokémon-inspired social multiplayer VR game for kids and teens where players ride collectible pets, explore alien worlds, collect rewards, hatch and upgrade pets, and play with friends.

Ruffnauts launched in Alpha last year and has grown to 61K+ reviews, becoming one of the highest-rated social VR games in its category. It was originally built by a team of 4.

Our first title, Blacktop Hoops, reached over 1M installs and maintains a 4.9-star rating across 23,000+ reviews.

We’re backed by Y Combinator, Makers Fund, and Kevin Lin, Co-Founder of Twitch. Our indie team brings experience from CD Projekt RED, Oculus, Unity, Google, and Downpour Interactive.

We are a small, fast-moving, remote team focused on building genre-defining social VR games through rapid iteration and real player feedback.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on Lead 3D Artist / Art Lead to raise the visual quality bar for Ruffnauts.

This is not a pure art director role. You will personally create, polish, review, optimize, and ship stylized 3D assets for a fast-moving social VR game built for kids and teens.

Your first mission will be helping us level up Ruffnauts’ worlds, pets, cosmetics, rewards, hub spaces, and game-ready assets as we prepare for a broader launch.

You’ll be the day-to-day art owner for the game: someone with strong taste, fast execution, and the judgment to keep internal and external contributors visually aligned.

The ideal candidate is a stylized 3D generalist with impeccable taste, strong execution speed, and the ability to work rapidly across multiple disciplines. You can make practical tradeoffs, ship appealing assets under real VR performance constraints, and take an idea from sketch to in-game implementation within the same day.

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, polish, and optimize stylized 3D assets for Ruffnauts including stylized creatures, environments, cosmetics, and more 
• Own day-to-day visual consistency and help raise the overall art quality bar across 2D, 3D, animations, VFX, and UI
• Improve worlds, biomes, hub spaces, props, cosmetics, pets, creatures, rewards, and shop items
• Review outsourced and contractor-created assets and give clear, actionable feedback
• Create simple briefs, references, and visual guidelines for internal and external contributors
• Bring assets into Unity and check scale, readability, performance, and implementation quality
• Collaborate with designers, engineers, animators, and technical artists to ensure assets are shippable on Meta Quest
• Make fast, pragmatic art decisions in a small team with shifting priorities and real player feedback

Requirements

• Experience shipping optimized 3D content in a premium or F2P VR title on Meta Quest, PSVR2, or other VR platforms
• Strong portfolio of stylized, game-ready 3D art including character art and environment art on shipped indie, AA, or AAA titles
• Strong experience with Blender or similar tools
• Strong experience with Unity
• Strong modeling, texturing, material, and optimization skills
• Strong taste around stylized appeal, silhouette, color, readability, charm, and marketability
• Experience creating environments, props, cosmetics, characters, creatures, or other real-time 3D assets
• Understanding of VR, Meta Quest, mobile, or constrained-platform performance requirements
• Ability to review art, give clear feedback, and maintain consistency across multiple contributors
• Comfortable working hands-on in a small, fast-moving team
• Strong communication skills and ability to turn rough direction into shippable assets

Bonus Points

• Experience with sketching and concept art production
• Experience creating basic stylized animations 
• Experience shipping content for VR, Meta Quest, or mobile
• 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
• Creature modeling, rigging, animation, or animation cleanup experience
• Experience with stylized VFX, spatial UI, diegetic UI, or in-world interaction visuals
• Experience with Substance Painter, ZBrush, Houdini, or procedural world-building tools
• Experience building light art pipelines for small teams, indie studios, or live games
• 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 visual identity of a breakout social VR game at a rare stage: early enough that your taste and execution can shape the product, but proven enough that real players are already showing up.

As our Lead 3D Artist / Art Lead, you won’t just make assets in isolation. You’ll help raise the overall quality bar for Ruffnauts’ worlds, pets, cosmetics, rewards, hub spaces, and player-facing content. Your work will directly influence how the game is perceived, shared, and remembered by 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 build a distinctive stylized world with charm, readability, and mass-market appeal.