Senior Technical Animator / Character TD

Antioch • New York City, NY

8h

About The Position

Antioch is seeking Senior Technical Animators / Character TDs to develop our sim-ready character pipeline, focusing on USD / Omniverse / Isaac Sim / Metahumans, to enhance simulation realism. This role involves working across character creation (especially Metahumans integration), character controllers, animation (hand-tuned and procedural), and prop physics to address real-world challenges. It's an early-stage, high-ownership position where your contributions will directly impact leading Physical AI teams in sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and construction. If you thrive in a 0 to 1 environment and want your work to be crucial for the success of autonomous systems, this role is for you.

Requirements

• Expert knowledge of Unreal Engine, motion matching, and animation blueprints.
• Ability to translate Unreal Engine learnings to a new engine.
• Strong portfolio showcasing custom Python tooling for character creation and animation in real-time game engines (preference for Unreal Engine Metahumans).
• Experience with procedural character animation, prop interaction, and generative pipelines.
• Deep knowledge of rigging and performant physics configuration for character clothing, hair, and accessories.
• Strong character animation experience, particularly using Sequencer and Control Rigs in Unreal Engine.
• Experience and comfort with agentic-assisted development workflows.
• A track record of shipping production-ready capabilities, not just prototypes.

Nice To Haves

• Direct experience with NVIDIA Omniverse and/or Isaac Sim.
• Deep knowledge of USD pipelines.
• Experience with NVIDIA's Newton or Warp libraries.
• Prior work on synthetic data generation, simulation, robotics, or autonomy.
• Familiarity with sensor-ready materials across camera, radar, lidar, and infrared simulation domains.

Responsibilities

• Build Python pipeline tooling for creating and exporting Metahumans from Unreal Engine to Isaac Sim, adhering to USD standards.
• Design and implement advanced character controllers featuring motion matching and procedural character animation, initially for humanoids and expanding to quadrupeds.
• Integrate frontier models for prompt-based animation to support massively parallel synthetic data generation.
• Create and refine custom animation clips using third-party libraries, procedural generation, or video-to-motion workflows.
• Rig and refine clothing, accessory, and prop setups, including configuring dynamic physics simulations for these elements.
• Develop modular character configuration and waypoint animation capabilities within the simulation platform.
• Act as a key representative of Antioch in customer conversations and site visits.
• Collaborate with founders, technical artists, and software engineers.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed