Jon Jones

About Jon Jones

I build the production infrastructure that makes large-scale art outsourcing work. 150+ artists, multiple countries, unified pipelines bridging ShotGrid, Jira, Perforce, Slack, Airtable, and Miro. 20+ years shipping art by building the vendor ops, tooling, and tracking systems studios don\'t have- Specialty experience with major licensed IP including Marvel (Midnight Suns DLC), FIFA, Lucasfilm (Star Wars), American Horror Story, Magic: The Gathering, Sesame Workshop, and McDonald\'s- Former Autodesk Subject Matter Expert for ShotGrid across the North American games industry, training studios from EA to Rockstar on production management best practices- Built end-to-end pipeline systems at Refactor Games, Firaxis, and Avalanche — ShotGrid administration, custom workflows, dashboards, and automated reporting- Created automation tooling including Slack bots, reconciliation engines, and vendor assignment systems that replace manual tracking with self-reporting pipelines- Built vendor management infrastructure in Airtable — contract tracking, invoice management, and spend reporting with dashboard views for stakeholders- Managed art production for Marvel\'s Midnight Suns DLC (Deadpool, Venom, Morbius, Storm) under Marvel\'s strict IP and quality standards- 20+ years managing budgets, contract negotiation, and vendor relationships across international studios- Speaker at GDC, XDS, MIGS, and SIGGRAPH; published in Gamasutra and Develop Magazine

Experience

1. Art Manager

   Refactor Games

   Oct 2025 — Present

   Art management, production, and pipeline tech at a sports studio developing the next generation of professional football (soccer) video games in Unreal Engine 5. Supporting internal and external teams with large-scale art outsourcing and production pipelines bridging Shotgrid, Perforce, Slack, Miro, Airtable, and Jira.Architected and built a cross-system production platform managing thousands of art assets across a 7-stage conversion pipeline, coordinating 35+ internal artists and 150+ external artists across multiple vendor studios in 4 time zones.Built an autonomous reconciliation engine that ingests asset state from 5 production systems into a unified database, runs 9 anomaly detection rules, computes vendor delivery velocity, and forecasts completion timelines to discover pipeline issues before they become blockers.Developed batch asset management tools with built-in safety: dry-run defaults, backward status protection, dependency violation detection, and a propose-then-approve workflow for automated fixes.Created a 7-tier identity resolution system for matching 3D assets across systems with different naming conventions, handling edge cases like localized name variants and ID format mismatches across version control and production tracking.Designed reporting infrastructure generating pipeline funnel visualizations, per-vendor velocity tracking, stale work alerts, dependency violation scans, and formatted Excel exports for vendor distribution.Automated vendor assignment workflows including bulk metadata updates across asset and task entities, assignment audit and gap detection, and privacy-respecting notification delivery to vendor Slack channels.

Skills

• Video Games
• Digital Sculpting
• Outsourcing
• 3d
• Animation
• Game Art
• Production Art
• Ps3
• Unreal Engine 3
• New Business Development
• Wii
• Social Games
• Production Management
• Production Managment
• Level Design
• Computer Games
• Game Development
• Art Production
• Gameplay
• Uv Mapping
• Casual Games
• Game Design
• Environment Art
• Art
• Concept Design
• Cinematics
• Character Animation
• Xbox 360
• Shaders
• Art Direction
• User Interface Design
• Texture Painting
• Presentations
• Rigging
• Mmo
• Modeling
• 3d Studio Max
• Maya
• Unreal Editor
• Low Poly Modeling