Job Type: Full-Time

ABOUT THE ROLE
We are a small indie team where responsibilities are shared and collaboration happens across every discipline. We are looking for a Character Animator who can take full ownership of bringing our characters to life: building rigs, crafting animations, and wiring everything up directly in Unreal Engine (preferred). You will work closely with the rest of the team to make sure every character moves with purpose, weight, and personality.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Build skeletal hierarchies from artist-delivered meshes, ensuring bone placement and hierarchy are correct for the full range of character motion.
• Perform weight painting to achieve clean, artifact-free skin deformations, and maintain weight paint across updates to the mesh.
• Build and maintain production control rigs in Unreal Engine's Control Rig system, including both forward kinematics (FK) and inverse kinematics (IK) setups.
• Implement full-body IK, foot planting, aim offsets, and other procedural solutions within Control Rig and Unreal's Animation Blueprint.
• Create a wide range of gameplay animations: locomotion cycles, combat, interaction, facial expressions, idle variations, and cinematic sequences.
• Work closely with Character Artists to ensure rig compatibility and provide feedback on skeleton and weight paint quality.
• Apply the twelve principles of animation, with particular focus on timing, squash and stretch, anticipation, and follow-through, to give characters distinct personalities.
• Set up and maintain Animation Blueprints, Blend Spaces, State Machines, and Motion Matching graphs in Unreal Engine.
• Collaborate with gameplay programmers to ensure animations are correctly driven by game state and exposed variables.
• Optimize animation assets for performance: compression settings, LOD animation levels, and animation budgets.
• Document rig and animation system conventions and contribute to team knowledge-sharing sessions.

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

•  3+ years of professional game animation experience with at least one shipped title.
• Solid understanding of skeletal anatomy, bone hierarchy design, weight painting, and skin deformation principles.
• Expert knowledge of Unreal Engine animation toolset: Control Rig, Animation Blueprints, State Machines, Blend Spaces, and Sequencer.
• Strong understanding of FK/IK solvers, full-body IK, and procedural animation techniques.
• Deep, practical knowledge of the twelve principles of animation and the ability to apply them purposefully to character performance.
• Proficiency in at least one DCC animation package (Maya, Blender, or MotionBuilder).
• Solid understanding of animation compression, LODs, and real-time performance budgets.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to iterate quickly based on feedback.
• Strong portfolio or reel showcasing a variety of character animations demonstrating timing, weight, and personality.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with Unreal Engine 5's Motion Matching system.
• Background in traditional hand-drawn or stop-motion animation.
• Scripting knowledge (Python or Blueprints) to automate animation pipeline tasks.
• Experience animating creatures, vehicles, or non-humanoid characters.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience.
• Access to the latest software licenses and hardware.
• Collaborative, creative environment with a genuine passion for games.
• Opportunities for professional development and conference attendance.