Senior/Lead Gameplay Animator (3C & FPS)

Location: Remote in Canada, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, or the United States; office-based in Guangzhou, Hangzhou, or Shanghai, China. Relocation to China is preferred. Remote work depends on location, time-zone compatibility, and collaboration needs.

Company

Develops AAA games requiring high-quality gameplay animation and responsive player experiences.

What you will do

• Own gameplay animation features from reference gathering and prototyping through asset creation, engine integration, debugging, and final polish.
• Create character movement and action animations for locomotion, directional changes, stance transitions, traversal, combat interactions, and first-person presentation.
• Refine movement responsiveness, action timing, transitions, interruption behavior, weapon handling, and camera feedback with gameplay designers and programmers.
• Build and maintain animation graphs, state machines, blend setups, and animation layers in the game engine.
• Use keyframe animation and motion-capture workflows, evaluate work in playable builds, and resolve issues with technical animation and engineering teams.
• At Lead level, guide feature planning, establish quality benchmarks, provide feedback, and mentor teammates while remaining hands-on.

Requirements

• Professional experience creating and implementing gameplay animation for AAA first-person shooters.
• A portfolio demonstrating body mechanics, weight, timing, posing, and responsive gameplay animation.
• Experience taking animation assets into a game engine and iterating on them in playable builds.
• Working knowledge of animation graphs, state machines, blending, additive animation, and gameplay-driven transitions.
• Proficiency with professional animation tools, including keyframe animation and motion-capture editing.
• Ability to investigate animation problems and collaborate with design and engineering partners within production constraints.

Nice to have

• Experience on recent AAA FPS, action, or action-adventure productions.
• Experience establishing or evolving 3C animation systems.
• Technical animation, scripting, or tool-development experience.
• Experience with inverse kinematics, motion matching, procedural animation, motion warping, or animation retargeting.
• Experience maintaining consistency between first-person presentation and third-person character animation.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on ownership of gameplay animation features from early prototypes through final in-game polish.
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with gameplay design, programming, technical animation, and engineering teams.
• Opportunity to influence animation systems and production workflows.
• Senior and Lead scopes are aligned with demonstrated capability and contribution.