Technical Animator Job Overview
| Role Title | Senior Technical Animator (Rigging & Unity3D Character Systems) |
| Company Name | High-Profile Co-Development Studio (Confidential Hiring) |
| Department | 3D Art Department |
| Location | Poznań, Poland, Europe (Fully Remote / Europe-based Teams) |
| Job Type | Permanent, Full-Time |
| Contract Options | Flexible (B2B Contract or Standard Labor Employment) |
| Experience Level | Senior (5+ Years of Professional Experience) |
| Primary Software | Unity3D Engine, Autodesk Maya (preferred) or Blender |
| Target Scale | AA and AAA Cross-Platform Titles (PC, Console, and Mobile) |
| Estimated Salary Range | €54,000 – €74,000 / year (B2B Remote) | 155,000 – 215,000 PLN / year (Local Poland Contract) Dependent on technical skill level, runtime optimization experience, and tax setup. |
| Core Perks | Flexible async workflows, paid vacation, competitive salary, annual international retreats |
Position Overview
Beffio studio is seeking a highly analytical, performance-driven Senior Technical Animator specializing in character rigging and Unity3D runtime animation systems to join our elite 3D Art Department. Operating in a permanent, fully remote structure across Europe, you will bridge the gap between pure artistic character creation and deep structural engine programming. Your primary mission will be to design robust, game-ready character skeletons, maintain flawless production pipelines, and build out high-performance runtime animation logic for our scaling roster of AA and AAA titles.
This is a hands-on technical leadership position where your choices directly dictate how fluidly, responsively, and efficiently characters move in live gameplay environments. You are an ideal candidate if you look at a beautiful character mesh and immediately begin calculating bone distribution budgets, optimal skin-weight allocations, state machine blending logic, and mobile processing constraints.
You will have the opportunity to architect production standards from scratch, eliminate asset pipeline bottlenecks between digital content creation (DCC) tools and game engines, and directly influence character quality across multiple high-profile projects alongside an international squad of veteran developers.
Comprehensive Role Responsibilities as Senior Technical Animator
Your daily duties cut across three key areas: advanced skeletal articulation, complex engine state architecture, and absolute performance optimization for multi-platform deployment.
1. Game-Ready Character Rigging & Structural Setup
- Robust Skeleton Architecture: Design, script, and maintain highly stable, production-ready character, creature, and mechanical rigs within Autodesk Maya or Blender.
- Flawless Mesh Deformation: Execute precise skin-weighting and deformation layouts, ensuring pristine movement quality around complex anatomical joints while maintaining highly intuitive, animator-friendly control schemes.
- Topology Validation: Partner actively with character artists during early modeling phases to analyze wireframe topology, pre-emptively flagging and correcting potential deformation or stretching issues.
- Constraint Adaptation: Strategically downscale and optimize bone counts, transform hierarchies, and influence weights to fit within tight hardware budgets, guaranteeing cross-platform compatibility across PC, console, and mobile platforms.
2. Unity3D Animation System Architecture
- State Machine Engineering: Completely manage and iterate on runtime animation architecture directly within the Unity3D ecosystem. Build out clean, scalable Animator Controllers, multi-layered blend trees, and layered state machines.
- Gameplay Integration: Ensure all animation layers blend seamlessly with active gameplay logic, collision volumes, physics states, and direct, real-time player controller inputs.
- Engine Debugging: Systematically isolate, diagnose, and resolve runtime visual anomalies—such as foot-sliding, erratic state transition snaps, root motion misalignments, or compression artifacts—directly within the Unity editor.
3. Workflow Automation & Pipeline Optimization
- DCC-to-Engine Automation: Streamline the transition of assets from DCC tools into Unity. Develop or support automated export configurations, uniform scale presets, and standardized pivot rules.
- Scripted Toolsmithing: Write clean, modular pipeline scripts (using Python or engine utilities) to automate repetitive rigging tasks, custom controller placements, or high-volume asset batching.
- Standardization Stewardship: Establish, document, and enforce rigid studio-wide conventions regarding naming matrices, folder structures, skeletal hierarchies, and asset version controls to ensure seamless vertical scalability.
4. Cross-Discipline Collaboration & System Support
- Technical Reference Point: Serve as the definitive technical consultant for animators, modelers, and gameplay programmers regarding mechanical constraints, runtime performance metrics, and system logic.
- Gameplay Responsiveness Polish: Collaborate with designers to tune transition blending curves and animation frame windows, maximizing gameplay responsiveness, hit feedback clarity, and combat feel.
- Technical Challenges Ownership: Autonomously take charge of intricate engineering hurdles, such as implementing localized ragdoll physics, Inverse Kinematics (IK) foot-placement setups, or dynamic secondary bone systems.
Candidate Requirements & Qualifications for Senior Technical Animator
Required Industry Experience
- Professional Longevity: A minimum of 5+ years of verified professional experience operating as a Technical Animator or Character Rigger within the video game industry.
- Shipped Unity Portfolio: Direct, hands-on experience driving animation pipelines through a complete production cycle on at least one shipped or majorly developed title utilizing the Unity3D engine.
- Technical Showcase: A dedicated technical reel or portfolio documenting your rigging competencies. This must explicitly show your underlying skeletal hierarchies, joint placement logic, deformation stress-tests, control mechanics, and active engine integration layouts.
Software & Engine Competencies
- DCC Expertise: Advanced, industry-level proficiency in Autodesk Maya (highly preferred) or Blender for core character rigging, skinning, and hierarchy management.
- Deep Unity Literacy: Expert-level mastery of Unity’s Mecanim animation system, including deep familiarity with Animator layers, override controllers, blend behaviors, and runtime execution profiling.
Technical Skills & Mindset
- Systems-Thinking Mentality: A natural aptitude for identifying systemic performance patterns, predicting asset pipeline bottlenecks, and constructing reusable, modular technical frameworks.
- Linguistic Fluency: Exceptional written and spoken English skills, with the ability to clearly break down highly technical challenges into actionable terms for non-technical team members.
- Remote Competency: Absolute comfort working within a highly autonomous, distributed, and asynchronous international team environment.
Bonus Skills & Desirable Attributes
Candidates possessing any of the following technical skill sets will be heavily prioritized during the application review:
- Direct, hands-on production experience adapting and compressing technical rigs specifically to bypass the performance bottlenecks of mobile chipsets or standalone VR systems.
- Familiarity with integrated Unity animation authoring extensions, such as uMotion or similar engine-native layout tools.
- Advanced pipeline programming experience, including writing custom editor extensions, inspectors, or workflow plugins directly within Unity utilizing C#.
- Exposure to procedural rigging networks or automated node-based pipeline workflows using tools like SideFX Houdini.
- Experience maintaining large-scale, scalable character pipelines across multi-project studio environments.
What We Offer
- High-Ambition Catalog: Direct involvement on premium stylized AA and AAA game projects characterized by significant technical ambition and highly distinct creative directions.
- Uncompromised Contract Flexibility: A stable, long-term full-time career path built on a rock-solid studio architecture. We support your localized corporate, tax, and legal requirements by offering flexible B2B billing structures alongside standard labor employment arrangements.
- High Structural Impact: A premium role where your technical solutions directly define studio-wide character standards, asset pipelines, tool choices, and cross-platform optimization approaches.
- Veteran Remote Culture: A highly mature, respectful remote workplace culture populated by seasoned industry professionals. We prioritize production predictability, streamlined asynchronous issue-tracking, and zero-fluff meetings over micromanagement.
- Holistic Well-being Packages: Highly competitive financial compensation structures paired with guaranteed paid vacation allocations to keep you rested and operating at peak capacity.
- Annual Studio Retreats: Fully covered, curated annual retreats bringing our international development team together in person for professional learning workshops, long-term strategic alignment, and genuine human connection.
Application Instructions
Beffio studio respect your engineering catalog and technical focus far more than standard corporate form letters. Therefore, we do not require a traditional cover letter.
To apply for this Senior Technical position, please compile and submit:
1. direct link to your current technical art reel, rigging portfolio, or codebase repositories demonstrating real-time engine integration.
2. brief summary note (under 300 words) describing a specific structural character system or engine integration issue you encountered on a past project, the precise logic you implemented to debug it, and the performance savings or workflow improvements achieved.
Remote Technical Animator (3D) job at Beffio studio, Poland
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