The Lead Animation Programmer is responsible for ensuring the delivery of animation systems for use by other game teams (primarily Cinematics, Animation and Scripting). The Lead Animation Programmer position will report to the Studio Programming Lead.
The role is also responsible for line management of the Animation Programming team as well as scheduling, prioritising tasks and mentoring of more junior staff. They must provide technical leadership and be able to strike a balance between the immediate and long term needs of the project. Their job will require them to be flexible and adaptable, able to help solve problems that touch multiple disciplines.
Responsibilities
- Ensure delivery of high quality animation systems by the team.
- Prioritise, plan and manage the work of the team with minimal oversight.
- Help define the technical direction and develop innovative solutions for difficult animation problems.
- Line manage members of the Animation Programming team, and communicate clearly with other team members easily.
- Help educate and support other teams to correctly and efficiently use animation systems.
- Communicate with external companies and contractors with assistance.
- Able to tune animation systems based on high level design input with minimal assistance.
- Use appropriate data structures and algorithms to maximize efficiency (for both development time and runtime performance).
- Be vigilant for and resolve new problems, delays and risks to delivery of the team’s objectives
- Seek support from higher levels management when required.
Requirements
- Exceptional communication skills, comfortable working across teams and mentoring staff.
- Capable of reading and quickly understanding complex code.
- Able to plan the work of the team including external dependencies with minimal input.
- Experience managing a team of programmers.
- Strong C++ programming and debugging skills.
- Excellent practical understanding of animation concepts.
- Understanding of the performance trade-offs for animation systems.
- Experience with graph-based animation systems.
- Extensive algorithm and data structure skills (including time and space complexity and real- world vs theoretical performance).
- Able to tune animation systems based on high level design input with minimal assistance.
- Able to understand and utilize multi-threading primitives & high level networking concepts.
- Self-motivated and driven to creatively solve problems.
- Videogame programming experience on animation systems, including having shipped at least one AAA PC/console title.
- Bachelor’s degree with a Computer Science/Software Engineering focus or equivalent experience.