Technical Director, Applied AI

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Technical Director, Applied AI based in Portugal.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on applying emerging AI technologies to game development, creative production, and engineering workflows.
You will sit at the intersection of AI, Engineering, Technical Art, Creative Technology, and R&D, identifying practical opportunities where AI can create measurable value.
The role combines research, rapid prototyping, technical experimentation, automation, and production integration across modern game-development environments.
You will explore AI models, coding agents, multimodal systems, automation frameworks, and agentic workflows while separating genuinely useful technology from short-lived trends.
You will work directly with engineers, Technical Artists, artists, and production teams to turn successful experiments into robust tools and scalable workflows.
Beyond building solutions, you will help establish practical AI standards, educate teams, and shape how AI is responsibly and effectively adopted across multiple disciplines.
This is an opportunity for a technically strong, highly curious individual to influence the future of applied AI while solving real production challenges in an international, fully remote environment.

• Research, evaluate, and prototype emerging AI models, APIs, coding agents, frameworks, automation technologies, and development tools.

• Identify practical opportunities for AI across game development, art production, engineering, technical art, and internal business workflows.

• Build proof-of-concepts and working prototypes to rapidly validate the technical and production value of new ideas.

• Distinguish genuinely useful technologies from short-lived trends, hype, and solutions that do not provide meaningful production value.

• Take successful R&D experiments through validation, integration, and adoption as robust production-ready tools or workflows.

• Explore and implement AI-assisted workflows across Unity3D, Unreal Engine, Houdini, Blender, Maya, and other creative and production environments.

• Build AI-powered tools, plugins, integrations, agents, automation systems, and internal production solutions.

• Collaborate with Engineering, Technical Art, VFX, Animation, Environment, Character, and Production teams to identify high-value use cases.

• Integrate AI into existing production pipelines rather than treating it as a separate experimental layer.

• Explore agentic development approaches, including coding agents, custom agents, MCP-based integrations, and multi-agent systems.

• Develop workflows that help developers and artists automate repetitive, time-consuming, or technically complex tasks.

• Experiment with AI-assisted approaches to software development, technical art, validation, documentation, code review, and production automation.

• Establish practical standards and best practices for AI adoption across different disciplines.

• Document successful workflows and create reusable resources that enable wider team adoption.

• Run internal workshops and demonstrations, helping team members progress from basic prompting toward building their own tools, agents, and AI-assisted workflows.

• Communicate complex AI and technical concepts clearly and practically to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Help shape the long-term strategy and capabilities around applied AI as the technology and production needs evolve.

Requirements:

• Strong senior-level technical experience in software engineering, Technical Art, tools development, creative technology, procedural systems, game development, or a comparable technical discipline.

• A proven track record of building real-world tools, systems, applications, plugins, pipelines, or production technologies.

• Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Python, C#, C++, TypeScript, or similar.

• Strong practical understanding of modern AI models, APIs, coding agents, automation, and AI-assisted development.

• Ability to rapidly prototype technical concepts and independently assess their practical value.

• Proven experience taking R&D projects from early experimentation through to production-ready solutions.

• Strong understanding of real-time production and game-development workflows.

• Experience working with environments such as Unity, Unreal Engine, Houdini, Blender, Maya, or comparable creative and technical platforms.

• Ability to work directly and effectively with both engineers and artists.

• Strong problem-solving skills, technical curiosity, and a high degree of ownership.

• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts in a clear and accessible way.

• Ability to teach, mentor, and enable others to adopt new technical workflows.

• Comfortable operating independently in areas where established best practices may not yet exist.

• Fluent English.

Nice to have:

• Professional game-development experience.

• A Technical Art, creative technology, or similar interdisciplinary background.

• Experience with procedural content generation and procedural production workflows.

• Strong Houdini experience.

• Experience with graphics, rendering, shaders, or real-time systems.

• Experience building custom AI agents, agentic workflows, or multi-agent systems.

• Experience with LLM APIs, multimodal models, local AI models, MCP, or comparable integration technologies.

• Experience developing internal production, developer, or creative technology tools.

• Experience applying AI to 2D, 3D, animation, VFX, video, or other content-production workflows.

• Open-source projects, plugins, tools, technical experiments, or significant personal projects demonstrating practical engineering ability.

• Experience introducing new technology, tools, or workflows into an established production team.

• Demonstrated experience building AI solutions that form part of a broader technical system rather than simply using existing AI interfaces.

Benefits:

• Significant ownership over how AI is researched, evaluated, and implemented within a large creative and game-development environment.

• Direct collaboration with technical and creative leadership, Engineers, Technical Artists, Artists, and production teams.

• The opportunity to experiment with rapidly evolving AI technologies and apply them to real-world game-production challenges.

• Freedom to prototype new approaches and transform successful experiments into production systems.

• A role combining R&D, engineering, game development, automation, and creative technology.

• The opportunity to influence workflows across multiple disciplines and increase the capabilities of the wider team.

• Fully remote work within an international and highly collaborative environment.

• Flexible contract options depending on location.

• Competitive compensation based on experience and contract structure.

• Annual team retreats.

• The opportunity to help shape and grow the organization's long-term applied AI capabilities.

We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team.

We appreciate your interest and wish you the best!

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