Character Animation Engineer

Character Animation Engineer

About Our Client

Our client is on a mission to help athletes and coaches reach their full potential by making objective, video-based feedback and expert instruction universally accessible through intuitive mobile and web apps. Their customers include Olympic teams, professional baseball clubs, national cricket programs, schools, and colleges around the world.

They believe in building a capital-efficient, sustainable, and profitable company—measured not by how much they raise, but by the real value they deliver to their users. Their culture rewards focus, craftsmanship, and the relentless pursuit of impact.

They're a remote-first team distributed across the U.S., Europe, and India.

Ideal candidate is someone who works for a gaming company as a character artist/engineer and is looking to branch out into the world of synthetic data/video generation or mobile app development. Must have the ability to code

About the Role

We're seeking a Character Animation Engineer who will specialize in producing high-quality synthetic video datasets and animation assets to train and validate AI/ML models.

Your mission: generate diverse, labeled, realistic synthetic human-movement data—avatars, skeletons, and motion sequences that mirror real-world sporting and human-motion scenarios—enabling models to generalize and scale.

You'll help build and maintain the animation → simulation → video pipeline, allowing the company to generate synthetic videos at scale, customize them for specific sports and movements, and iterate rapidly using real customer feedback.

What You'll Do

• Transform 3D joint coordinate data from motion-capture systems into rigged, retargeted human avatar animations as the foundation for synthetic video generation.
• Design, build, and optimize workflows/pipelines for synthetic video generation—including motion augmentation, camera variation, background simulation, avatar diversity, and sporting contexts.
• Use Autodesk Maya, Blender, Metahuman, Unreal, or similar tools to create avatars and motion sequences, and integrate them into automated or semi-automated generation systems.
• Collaborate with the ML team to define metadata and annotation schemas (labels, trajectories, segmentation, event markers) that meet modeling requirements.
• Generalize your expertise over time into areas such as generative content creation, direct AI model training or product development.

What You'll Bring

• 4–6 years of industry experience in 3D animation, rigging, or simulation, with strong proficiency in Maya, Blender, Metahuman, Unreal Engine, or equivalent tools.
• Deep familiarity with motion-capture data (joint coordinate sets, skeleton hierarchies, motion formats) and converting them into animated avatars or other usable data representations.
• Python scripting and automation experience for building tools and pipelines.
• A growth mindset and willingness to expand from animation into data generation, pipeline development, and ML integration.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills—comfortable and excited to partner with ML and product teams.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Animation/Graphics, or a related field.
• A bias for action and "get-things-shipped" mentality.
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced, customer-focused environment, with strong accountability and continuous learning.

Why Join Our Client?

• Play a foundational role improving how AI models perceive and understand human movement.
• Work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of human motion, animation, and ML—with real impact on athletes and coaches worldwide.
• Enjoy high autonomy and a clear line of sight to customer value.
• Join a tight-knit team where your work matters and bureaucracy is minimal.
• Grow into adjacent domains like generative AI and product development.
• Benefit from remote flexibility and a culture focused on outcomes, not hours.
• Help build products that people love, in a space that's fun, challenging, and deeply rewarding.

The sports and fitness market is massive—and their users are deeply passionate. We can't wait to see the impact you'll have on the team, the product, and the athletes and coaches they support.

Let's do great things together.