3D Architect: Unreal, Datasmith, Industrial Products

Most 3D job posts ask for a generalist. We're doing the exact opposite.We don't want somebody who can do a little of everything. We want somebody who's dangerous at one thing and won't shut up about it. We're Mainstay Digital, a 3D studio in Plano, Texas. Our job is to make complicated machines make sense. Robots. Packaging lines. Security entrances. Medical devices. The stuff that runs the physical world and still gets sold with a 40-page PDF and a prayer. Kawasaki Robotics. Yaskawa. KUKA. Boon Edam. Pearson Packaging. Baxter. Tidel. Over 1,000 projects since 2022. Our clients' buyers sit in a committee. Engineering, ops, procurement, finance. 6 or 7 people who have never once seen the machine run. We take a messy CAD file and turn it into something they can explore, understand, and say yes to. That's the entire business. Making yes easier. What we're hiring A 3D architect. Somebody who builds the pipeline, not just the shot. Unreal. UE5, cold. Datasmith and PiXYZ for CAD ingest, and you know why tessellation settings matter before you hit import. Nanite, Lumen, Path Tracer, Sequencer, Movie Render Graph. Variant Manager when a configurator is on the table. CAD. STEP, JT, SolidWorks, NX, Creo, CATIA. You've been handed a 4GB assembly with 80,000 parts, 11 nested subassemblies and zero naming convention, and you had a plan by lunch. Blender. Still required, still every week. Retopo, cleanup, geo nodes, the hard-surface work the CAD never gave you. Unreal is where it ships. Blender is where it gets fixed. Environments. A robot on a real line, in a real plant, in real light, is a sale. You build the plant around the robot. Motion. Mechanically honest animation. If the gripper opens the wrong way, the client's engineer catches it, and they're right. Real-time and web delivery. glTF and USDZ for AR that runs in a phone browser with no app download. You have an actual opinion about Pixel Streaming vs WebGL vs WebGPU and when each one is worth the money. AI, for real. This is a requirement. You've put AI into a client pipeline and shipped the result. Custom ComfyUI workflows. AI for environment plates, texture generation, upscaling, matting, denoising, previz you can put in front of a client on day 2 instead of day 9. Image-to-3D for background props, never hero geometry, and you know exactly why. We want the person who built the workflow, broke it, fixed it, and can tell us precisely where AI made the work better and precisely where it made it worse. If you're doing the most interesting AI plus 3D work you personally know of, that's the reel we want. Both languages of 3D. Technical content that teaches an operator how to keep his fingers. Marketing content that stops traffic at IMTS. Same product, 2 completely different jobs, 2 completely different edits. You can do both, and you know when you've picked up the wrong one. The realities You get a storyboard and a client CAD file, usually messy. You give back a finished piece. Boardomatic, animatic, animation, lighting, look dev, render, edit, motion graphics. One person from brief to delivery, with review at 3 checkpoints. You'll move between Blender and Unreal inside the same project. Blender for offline. Unreal for real-time. Our deadlines are trade show dates. Automate. PACK EXPO. IMTS. MODEX. Those dates do not move. A client's booth costs 6 figures. A late delivery lands on a real person. Ongoing work. Up to 40 hours a week, long term, independent contractor. Who thrives here You make the call. If a shot isn't reading, you re-block it and tell us why. You flag a slip on day 2, not day 9. You like constraints. The product is what it is. The CAD is what it is. You treat a naming convention as law. Who gets passed over Reels with 40 gorgeous seconds and no sequence in them. People whose AI experience is a Midjourney moodboard. Anyone who needs every beat art-directed. Anyone who got into 3D for characters, creatures, or consumer brand films. The subject matter is machines. Forever. That's a permanent condition here, not a phase. To apply Send your reel. Video only, stills won't be reviewed for this role. Pick 2 pieces, tell us which shots were yours, and tell us what you actually did on them. Then answer the questions below. Short answers are fine. Skip the cover letter template, we'll stop reading it. One more thing. If you're excellent at this, you're already forming an opinion about how we should be doing it differently. Lead with that. Screening questions 1. Link one finished piece you took from storyboard to delivery. What was the deadline, did you hit it, and if you missed it, what happened? 2. Walk us through a CAD-to-Unreal hand-off you've done. What came in, what did Datasmith or PiXYZ do to it, what did you fix in Blender, and what shipped? 3. What have you built with AI that's in a real client pipeline right now? Name the tool, the workflow, the step it replaced, and where it still fails. 4. A client sends revised CAD halfway through a job. What do you re-do, what do you cut, and how do you tell them? 5. What's the most interesting thing happening in real-time 3D right now that most studios haven't caught up to yet? Shortlisted candidates do a paid 4-hour test: one shot from a storyboard we've already produced, so we can compare your version against a finished result we already know.