Senior Technical Animator - Unannounced Project

About the role

NaturalMotion, a Zynga and Take-Two Interactive label, is looking for a Senior Technical Animator to support its next unannounced project. You will work alongside the Animation Team to help deliver and bring to life the game's characters. The role is hybrid: two days per week in the London office and the rest at home.

Key responsibilities

• Create and maintain the rigging and technical animation pipeline for the projects.
• Help implement characters as part of the Animation Team.
• Report to the Lead Animator and Art Director.

Required profile

• Expert knowledge of the skeletal pipeline, from rigging to exporting finished characters into the game, with a focus on mobile limitations (bipedal and non-bipedal).
• Advanced knowledge of major third-party rigging systems such as Advanced Skeleton, Rapid Rig and mGear.
• Experience with scalable animation systems that work across a wide range of mobile devices.
• Good documentation and communication, with complete ownership of the pipeline.

Required skills

• Animation systems in Unreal Engine: debugging, modifying and building them from scratch.
• Retargeting and shared skeleton pipelines, including between non-matching skeletons.
• Cloth simulation and dynamics in engine and 3D software, and their mobile constraints.
• Scripting in MEL, Python, Max Script and similar.
• Foundational rigging: bones, IK, splines, blend shapes, skinning, node editing and Unreal animation blueprints.
• Bonus points: facial rigging, motion capture, procedural animation, LOD optimisation, and experience in shaders, lighting tech or VFX.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and discretionary annual bonus.
• 26 days holiday plus bank holidays and 2 paid personal days.
• Pension with double employer matching, private medical and dental insurance, and life and income protection.
• Maternity and paternity leave, mental health and neurodiversity support, and an employee stock purchase plan.
• Fitness reimbursement of £600 per year, flexible working hours and social events.