Senior Animator

Electronic Arts is seeking a Senior Animator to join the Research & Engineering team. As a Senior Animator, you will have an extensive understanding of content pipelines, from source asset creation to final rendering, and excel at balancing visual quality with performance. You will implement novel solutions to complex art challenges and keep pace with relevant research, understanding how technology must evolve to craft fantastic game worlds and visually-convincing experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Create high-quality gameplay animation across locomotion, traversal, combat, reactions, interactions, and character performance.
• Establish the animation quality bar, movement principles, and production standards, while providing mentorship, feedback, and craft direction as the discipline grows.
• Partner closely with Art Direction and Design to define posing, timing, weight, impact, responsiveness, and gameplay readability.
• Support playable demos and vertical slices by taking animation from early exploration through polished in-engine implementation.
• Collaborate with Technical Animation and Engineering on runtime animation systems, state machines, blending, procedural solutions, and scalable workflows.
• Help define the project's animation style and motion language, ensuring character movement and interaction feel cohesive with the overall visual direction, character personality, and gameplay goals.
• Lead animation reviews across internal and external production, ensuring work consistently meets the established creative and technical quality bar.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience in AAA game development with 8+ years of professional animation experience and shipped console or PC titles.
• Strong demo reel showing high-quality gameplay animation, locomotion, combat, reactions, and character performance.
• Experience with standard tools such as Maya, Blender, ZBrush, Substance 3D, Marvelous Designer, or comparable software.
• Experience working in Unreal, Unity, Frostbite, or another modern proprietary engine.
• Experience mentoring animators, leading animation reviews, and providing craft direction is expected; experience managing small internal or external animation teams is a strong plus.
• Expert understanding of animation fundamentals including posing, timing, spacing, weight, impact, and motion clarity.
• Strong experience implementing animation directly in a real-time game engine, including state machines, blending, motion matching, IK, or comparable runtime systems.
• Strong understanding of how animation supports gameplay responsiveness, readability, camera, controls, and player feedback.
• Experience adapting animation across different game genres, including action-focused experiences, character types, camera perspectives, and gameplay needs.