First, let us talk about the culture and benefits of the studio before the basic requirements of the role:

What does it mean to work at our client’s office?

• Work-life balance: a work family that does not replace your family-family

• Flexible workday hours and work-from-home opportunities

• Time off when you need it: a wellness-first and family-first mindset

• High transparency and easy access to studio leadership

Benefits

• Generous medical, dental, vision, EAP, FSA, and both short & long-term disability

• Paid vacation time

• Paid sick time

• Paid holidays including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day

• Matching 401(k) program

• Annual profit-sharing from Paradox Interactive

• Easy access off I-405 and free parking

• Skilled, passionate, and fun co-workers

• Pet-friendly office

What are the basics about the role?

We are looking for a Senior Animator that has a deep love of bringing characters and the worlds they inhabit to life. You’ll work with the Game Director to develop exciting new IPs and define the animation style for a new and exciting title and partner with fellow animators to realize that vision.

The ideal candidate has a great demo-reel which demonstrates a superb sense of timing, personality, action, and is able to demonstrate a firm grasp of character art production pipelines.

Okay, time for some bullet points:

• Establish, create and maintain animations that will bring our game world alive in order to build an immersive, exciting gaming experience. Animate new characters from scratch, while also supporting and expanding on existing character movement sets.

• Animate new characters from scratch, while also supporting and expanding on existing character movement sets.

• Re-target motion and adjust existing animation sets across a variety of character rigs.

• Incorporate animation direction as well as give and receive character performance feedback.

• Collaborate with the character art team, systems designers, and engineers to ensure consistency between vision, creation and implementation of animation assets.

• Collaborate with technical teams to develop run-time character animation procedures & pipelines.

• Troubleshoot and solve art production issues related to rigging and animation in partnership with other members of the character team.

• Move animation data into the game through our production pipeline.

• In partnership with the Character Technical Artist develop and evolve sophisticated character rigs that are capable of supporting the dynamic performances we are targeting.

• Work with existing character models and rigs in order to modify animation created by other team members.

What do we need you to bring to the team to impact the studio?

• You’ve worked on a variety of projects - big or small, indie or 1st party, PC or console or mobile, licensed or new IP, etc. - to understand the breadth of issues you have to anticipate and know that every project is different

• Ability to showcase a task driven, self-motivated, proactive approach to the work and work well under deadline pressure.

• An excellent aptitude for problem solving and the ability to follow an efficient workflow and pipeline process.

• A strong sense of timing, personality, action, acting and staging. You can bring characters to life through movement that's easily readable from a distance and make highly responsive characters while telling a convincing and evocative story, without hindering game play.

• Exceptional visual/technical understanding of animation mechanics with an emphasis on weight, good timing and fluid, overlapping motion.

• Understanding of character pipeline considerations such as animation re-targeting, standard locomotion sets (walk/run/pivot etc) and working with animation blends.

• A deep understanding of Maya and Unity

• Experience of when to keyframe, when to motion capture, and how to blend both sources of motion along with ragdoll and other procedural techniques into character performances.

• Solid understanding of next-gen animation development processes, limitations and dependencies including motion-capture, key-framed, dynamic and physics-based movement.

Let us talk about brownie points. These are bonuses, but not required.

• Solid drawing skills

• Experience 3D modelling

• Shipped titles using Unity.

• Professional character rigging experience.

• Experience creating animations to fit stylized or minimalist art styles.

• Experience in any other area of art production (3D modeling, VFX, concept, etc.).

• Motionbuilder experience

• Art-related degree (BA or BFA) and/or comparable professional experience.