Animation Director

Electronic Arts is seeking an experienced and visionary Animation Director to lead the animation team and drive the animation direction for its games.

The Animation Director will be responsible for setting the animation vision, defining the style and quality bar, and ensuring the seamless integration of animation into compelling player experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Define and deliver the vision and quality bar for all motion in the game.
• Drive animation quality while balancing performance, continuity, technical, scheduling, and budgetary requirements.
• Hire, mentor, guide, and manage the work of the animation team.
• Provide regular feedback and direction to the animation team.
• Drive the evolution of the animation pipeline and establish efficient animation workflows and procedures.

The Animation Director will collaborate with:

• Creative and Art leadership to define the overall animation direction, style, quality, and execution.
• Design and Engineering to ensure motion meets the gameplay, responsiveness, and player-experience requirements of the game.
• Technical animators, character riggers, and modelers to ensure characters maintain a consistently high quality bar in motion.
• Graphics engineers to ensure characters are grounded in the world through lighting, shadows, visual effects, weather, and environmental interaction.
• Physics engineers to ensure characters operate within the physical rules defined and interact with other characters and the environment in believable ways.

Qualifications:

• A great eye for style, performance, and quality, combined with strong technical understanding.
• Passion for innovation and continuous improvement.
• 5+ years as a senior animation contributor or leader, including experience directing animation on high-quality AAA games.
• Strong leadership, people-management, communication, and mentoring skills.
• Ability to inspire and lead a team to deliver high-quality work on time and within budget.
• Skill in guiding a team to balance creative ambition with technical and production requirements.
• Experience and confidence directing actors and athletes for motion capture.
• A collaborative, motivated, and accountable approach to team leadership.
• Strong knowledge of current animation practices, technologies, and industry trends.
• Experience directing or working with real-time animation systems, including blend trees, state machines, motion-matching systems, or comparable runtime solutions, in engines such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite, or other proprietary technology.

Beneficial Qualifications:

• Experience evaluating and applying emerging animation technologies, including machine learning, procedural animation, performance capture, and automation tools, to improve quality or production efficiency.
• A passion for sports and strong knowledge of American football.
• Technical fluency with scripting, tools, or engine workflows that supports effective collaboration with engineers and technical teams.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive benefits package, including medical coverage, mental wellness support, retirement savings, paid time off, parental leave, free games, and more.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development.