Lead Character Tools Engineer

Join the PlayStation Central Technology team as a Lead Character Tools Engineer. In this role, you will focus on character technology, including creation, rigging, and animation. You will develop and distribute tools, optimize processes, and integrate emerging technology into game development. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in game development pipelines, strong programming skills, and a deep understanding of Autodesk Maya software.

Responsibilities

• Prototyping, creating, and collaborating to deploy and maintain technical tools and practices for character creation, rigging, and animation.
• Collaborating with internal team members and studio stakeholders to prototype and harden create tools considering contemporary development workflows.
• Developing or maintaining project pipeline tools and system environments, and setting up and maintaining project specific environments and automation opportunities.
• Developing or maintaining project pipeline tools and system environments
• Experience as technical artist or engineer to develop and deploy tools to support character creation, rigging, simulation, or animation pipelines in a run-time environment

Requirements

• BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Graphic Art, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Strong understanding of deformation and mesh processing

• Excellent knowledge of Maya with general knowledge of Maya rigging
• 10+ years in a game development studio or previous experience creating artist-facing tools on technical art or engineering team in a production environment
• Decent sense of humor
• Experience leveraging Agentic AI models

Capable of writing and debugging C++

• Extensive experience in working with game editors and excellent working knowledge of technical specifications of workflow from DCC to complex real-time environments
• Excellent troubleshooting skills and the ability to creatively solve problems
• Strong Python programming skills and experience with PyQt/Pyside
• Motionbuilder, Maya, Houdini, experience
• Exposure to photogrammetry, motion capture/performance capture

Preferred

• Familiarity with industry trends in character rigging, gameplay animation, cinematic animation, deformation and simulation usage in character animation pipelines
• Experience with HLSL, MaterialX
• Experience with other programming languages, especially C++
• Experience with Perforce, Git, Confluence

Pay

USD 143,700 - 215,500