Technical Artist

Tolan is an Embodied Companion: a cute, friendly AI alien that you talk with naturally, like a friend. They have unique preferences and personalities, and over time they form memories about you, your friendship, and your life.

Tolan is built by an experienced team with a lot of history together. We previously founded Even, acquired for $300m in 2022. Our engineering team comes from places like Apple, Square, and character.ai. Our design and creative team has won Apple Design Awards and designed products like Facebook, Dropbox, and Poparazzi. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF.

The role

Technical artists at Tolan bridge the creative vision and technical implementation for our 3D character embodiment work. You will work closely with our creative director, artists, animators, and engineering team to bring features from concept -> in-engine Unity prototypes -> shipping to our user base. From shader fine-tuning to asset optimization, you'll be responsible for making sure everything looks stunning in-engine while maintaining top-notch usability and performance.

You might be a fit if you:

• Have extensive Unity experience as a key contributor to games or XR applications that shipped to a large consumer audience
• Thrive on in-engine work: deep integration, asset preparation, optimization, and close collaboration with Unity engineers
• Excel at shader development and have experience with VFX creation
• Are proficient in Cinema4D (or similar) and comfortable with light animation editing in Maya (or similar)
• Do your best work on a small team or solo
• Have deeply integrated AI into your daily work
• Love to ship quickly and make contact with reality as often as possible

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If you think you may be a fit to join us, please email evidence of great work to hiring@portola.ai‍