Senior Technical Artist, Animation - Unpublished R&D Product

As a Senior Technical Artist (Technical Animation), you’ll define and maintain the systems that bring our characters and creatures to life including complex animation state machines, layered interactions, and IK-driven behaviors in our upcoming MMO. Working at the intersection of animation, design, and engineering, you’ll build scalable animation graphs, ensure believable motion, and optimize performance across a vast, dynamic world.

You’ll collaborate with animators, designers, and engineers to develop robust Unreal Engine animation systems that balance scalability, fidelity, and efficiency. As a key bridge between creative intent and technical execution, you’ll drive the evolution of our animation framework and ensure seamless, high-quality integration across the game.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain complex animation state machines, layered animation systems, and override logic supporting split-body for player characters, NPCs, creatures, and props.
• Collaborate with animators, character tech artists, and designers to develop efficient, believable, and tech-friendly animation flows.
• Define best practices for animation setup while owning the debuggability, documentation, maintainability, and long-term health of animation blueprints and graphs within Unreal Engine.
• Partner with engineers to build and evolve animation runtime systems and debugging workflows.
• Drive optimization efforts across animation assets and graphs to meet performance and memory targets.
• Collaborate with cross-discipline partners to ensure character systems scale effectively across massive multiplayer environments.
• Develop scalable animation retargeting strategies to support characters and creatures of varying proportions while minimizing animation counts.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional experience as a technical animator or technical artist in games or related industries.
• Deep expertise with Unreal Engine animation workflows, including complex Animation Blueprints, state machines, blend spaces, and layered animation systems.
• Proven experience designing scalable, reusable animation systems for large-scope character setups, including players, NPCs, and creatures.
• Strong art foundation with a deep understanding of animation principles, anatomy, and motion.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate across art, design, and engineering disciplines

Desired Qualifications:

• Experience with Unreal Control Rig and Sequencer
• Familiarity with C++ and/or Python within Unreal Engine.
• Expertise in Autodesk Maya for rigging and animation support.
• Experience working with software like Kawaii, Chaos, Havok.
• Prior experience supporting MMO or large-scale games with complex character ecosystems.
• Experience with runtime IK, or motion warping

For this role, you'll find success through craft expertise, a collaborative spirit, and decision-making that prioritizes the delight of players. We will be looking at your past studies, experience, and your personal relationship with games. If you embody player empathy and care about players' experiences, this could be your role!

Our Perks:

Riot focuses on work/life balance, shown by our open paid time off policy and other perks such as flexible work schedules. We offer medical, dental, and life insurance, parental leave for you, your spouse/domestic partner, and children, and a 401k with company match. Check out our benefits pages for more information.

At Riot Games, we put players first. That mission drives every decision in our quest to create games and experiences that make it better to be a player. Whether you’re working directly on a new player-facing experienc