Technical Animation Director

Activision Blizzard, Inc. • Santa Monica, CA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Activision is looking for a Technical Animation Director to join the development of our next AAA title—an Open World RPG set in a new, epic IP. Feed your creativity while driving the development of our game’s world and story! Collaborate with our highly-skilled team to build something innovative, exhilarating, and expansively entertaining. You will help develop animation systems and will be driving the long-term vision and detail the roadmap of the animation system, working with engineers across multiple time zones. As a leader on the project, you’ll help take the studio and our game from great to even better—with a focus on inclusivity, mutual respect (for ourselves and our players), thoughtfulness, empathy, professionalism, and collaboration.

Requirements

• At least 12 years experience in Computer Animation or related field
• Comfortable with state of the art in computer animation
• Have shipped at least 1 AAA games
• Proficient with code and data optimization
• Experience with DCC tool API, in DCC packages like Maya or Motion Builder
• Good comfortable knowledge PySide/PyQt to build Tool’s UI
• Comprehensive understanding of object-oriented programming
• Excellent math skills
• Good knowledge of CPU and memory architectures
• Solid debugging skills including the ability to debug at an assembly-level when necessary
• Creative, motivated, focused, passionate
• Have experience in Director role or leadership role on large AAA productions

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Technical Animation and/or leading a content focused team in AAA games
• Strong C++ skills
• Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• Experience with shader programming languages
• Experience with animation compression and streaming

Responsibilities

• Identifying and pushing the character pipeline towards a future proof iterative structure
• Drive the vision and roadmap animation systems for the next 5 years and beyond
• Being able to work across disciplines, coordinate with artists, animators, technical artists, riggers, programmers, and production.
• Working with other engineers, to actively implement the core animation systems
• Collaborate with engineering, design and art teams around the globe
• Participate in the design, performance and code review process
• Being proactive in identifying bottlenecks and introducing future-facing animation solutions to various teams.
• Empowering and leading the team to autonomy to accomplish optimal results within their expertise

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others
• Relocation assistance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director