Senior Animator

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Animator to join our Research & Engineering team at Electronic Arts. As a Senior Animator, you will be responsible for creating high-quality gameplay animation and establishing animation quality standards. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to define animation styles, motion languages, and production standards.

Responsibilities:

• Create high-quality gameplay animation across various aspects such as locomotion, traversal, combat, reactions, interactions, and character performance.
• Establish animation quality standards, movement principles, and production standards, while providing mentorship and craft direction.
• Partner 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 to 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.