• Own the animation vision and direction for the project, ensuring consistency of animation style, weight, and responsiveness across all characters • Define animation principles, style guides, and quality benchmarks for player characters, enemies, and interactive elements • Lead the implementation of animation systems in-engine, including state machines, blend trees, animation graphs, IK, root motion, and procedural techniques • Make final creative decisions related to animation, balancing expressive motion with gameplay clarity and technical constraints • Review animation work from team members, providing clear, actionable feedback • Create high quality, player-critical animations for locomotion, combat, traversal, and interaction, in both first-person and third-person as applicable • Collaborate with artists to storyboard all cutscenes and cinematic sequences and animate the necessary characters to effectively convey critical story beats • Work closely with Design to ensure animation supports gameplay intent, timing, and player feedback • Partner closely with Engineering and Technical Design to develop scalable, maintainable animation systems and troubleshoot animation-related issues such as blending artifacts, deformation problems, timing issues, and performance concerns • Manage and mentor an Animator and Technical Animator, providing guidance, feedback, and growth opportunities • Coordinate animation priorities with Production, ensuring work is scoped, scheduled, and aligned with project milestones • Serve as the primary animation contact for Design, Engineering, Art, and QA • Be highly collaborative with other team members and willing to provide timely and constructive criticism to submissions from colleagues • Respond well to feedback and constructive criticism to their submissions and workflows and be willing to quickly iterate on assets and systems • Be self-motivated and highly adaptable to new workflows and processes while willing to learn new skills and insert into gaps within the team structure. We are looking for that “Indie dev” mindset.