Senior Technical Animator

Playground Games is looking for a Senior Technical Animator to join our Fable team on a Permanent basis.

About us:

As a first-party Xbox Game Studio, we are passionate about making genre-defining games that are accessible, beautiful, and, most of all, fun. We are excited to be rebooting the much-loved Fable franchise and are expanding our diverse team to create a new classic in the action RPG genre.

About the role:

As Senior Technical Animator, you will be working with the Technical Animation team contributing to the wider Character group to bring best in class characters to Fable. You will work with the animation, character art, technical art and engineering teams to devise animation solutions and pipelines, create rigs for animators and assist in developing our animation and character workflows. Your strong analytical ability and planning skills will help the studio develop future proof rigging/animation pipelines and tools for character and animation production.

Our ideal candidate is a Senior Technical Animator who is passionate about their craft, skilled in rigging, scripting, simulation, and runtime animation systems and has the track record to prove it.

This is a permanent role based at our state-of-the-art facilities in Royal Leamington Spa, with the choice of hybrid working.

What you’ll do:

• Create advanced character rigs and deformation solutions.
• Create tools to improve/support our internal animation and character pipelines.
• Setup animation networks and implement animated content in our custom, proprietary engine.
• Problem solve and build innovative solutions to help realise best in class characters.

What you’ll bring:

• At least 3 years of experience as a Senior Technical Animator, with demonstrable work on at least 1 published title (ideally AAA).
• An outstanding portfolio demonstrating your animation rigs, tools development, or runtime solutions for AAA titles.
• Strong knowledge and experience of rigging and deformation in Maya.
• Solid Python scripting knowledge (plugin development with Python/C++ would be a distinct advantage).
• A positive outlook and a problem-solving mindset.
• A genuine passion for video games.

This is a fantastic opportunity to make a world-class game with an established, talented, and collaborative team at one of the industry’s most exciting first-party game studios.

Playground Games is an equal opportunities studio and encourages candidates of all backgrounds to apply.