Senior Technical Animator (Unreal Engine)

Location: Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Salary: CAD $99,800–$147,680 per year, with potential bonus and equity awards in regular roles.

Company

Small Axe Studios is a stand-alone hirify.global game studio developing a new sports franchise and player-focused interactive entertainment experience.

What you will do

• Design, maintain, and optimize body and facial character rigs for gameplay and cinematic assets.
• Define asset-binding and skinning pipelines supporting character art and animation workflows.
• Collaborate with animators to ensure rigs meet quality and usability requirements.
• Build and maintain body and facial rigging tools, including FACS-based facial systems.
• Develop motion-capture processing pipelines and animation databases.
• Work with engineering to integrate character assets efficiently into runtime environments.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience as a Technical Animator or Rigging TD in games or a related industry.
• Strong knowledge of body and facial rigging, skinning, human anatomy, deformation, and animation principles.
• Proficiency in Maya and MotionBuilder.
• Strong scripting ability in Python.
• Proven experience integrating character rigs into Unreal Engine.
• Familiarity with Control Rig, MetaHuman, and Unreal animation systems.

Nice to have

• C++ scripting or development experience.
• Experience with character simulation, including cloth, muscle, or hair.
• Familiarity with motion-capture pipelines.
• Experience developing rigging tools or facial solvers for real-time performance.
• Experience with cloth rigging and simulation.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative work across engineering, animation, art, and character teams.
• Opportunity to contribute to a brand-new sports game IP from the ground up.
• Regular employees may receive bonus and equity awards.
• Regular roles include a range of medical, financial, and other benefits.
• Reasonable accommodation is available during the application, interview, and employment process.