Lead Technical Animator

CD PROJEKT RED is looking for a Lead Technical Animator to join our studio in Boston and work on Project Orion, the follow-up to Cyberpunk 2077. You will bring your years of expertise, leadership skills, attention to detail, and passion for creating animation pipelines and systems for characters, vehicles, and weapons to our growing team.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and manage a high performing Technical Art team comprising Rigging TD’s and Technical Animators.
• Leverage your skillsets in both digital content creation tools and real-time engines to drive and deliver high-quality character, vehicle, and weapon workflows, pipelines, and animation solutions.
• Manage your direct reports and help them grow in their role and ambitions, including setting up 1:1s, performance management, hiring and promotions.
• Work with Directors and Production to estimate and plan work.
• Collaborate closely with designers, artists and other developers to understand their needs and ensure that your team is aligned to deliver on expectations.
• Coordinate and drive cross-discipline functional teams from feature conception to completion.
• Establish and maintain best practices offering guidance to support content development team artistic and technical objectives.
• Mentor the technical art team, building an environment of creativity, trust, and excellence aligned with the company’s values and goals.

Pipeline:

• Prototype, research, integrate, and extend rigging and animation systems.
• Help devise, develop, and maintain pipelines for asset creation focusing on characters, weapons, and vehicles.
• Solve complex technical art challenges while ensuring workflows and systems are efficient and scalable.
• Actively participate in evaluating performance and optimization to ensure seamless cross-team gameplay experiences.
• Foster cross-department collaboration to ensure the content and animation work effectively contributes across game teams and systems.

Qualifications:

• Minimum 7+ years of experience in the video games industry, including at least one shipped AAA title through the entire production lifecycle.
• Experience leading a technical art team.
• Expertise in Unreal Engine 5 Rigging and Animation Systems.
• Animation pipeline knowledge including developing and scripting tools for Maya, MotionBuilder, or other DCC applications.
• Proven track record of building character, vehicle, weapon workflows and pipelines.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills.
• Ability to think creatively and strategically to overcome technical challenges and drive innovation in technology.
• Demonstrated commitment to taking ownership, setting goals, exchanging knowledge and driving initiatives independently.