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Senior Animation Programmer

The Senior Animation Programmer is responsible for designing and implementing large scale animation systems with minimal guidance and providing technical support and mentoring to more junior members of staff. The Senior Animation Programmer position will report to either a Lead or Director in the programming team.

The position is also expected to be proactive in dealing with other disciplines to resolve problems quickly, elicit clear requirements and translate them into flexible reusable solutions. As well as solving challenging new technical problems, a Senior Animation Programmer will have an excellent understanding of best-practice and standard techniques within game animation (including experience with animation graphs) with a focus on character animation and will keep up-to-date on innovations within the industry.

Responsibilities

• Deliver high quality game animation systems using appropriate levels of abstraction.
• Support other teams in the use of animation systems and work closely with technical animators and animators to deliver features.
• Identify and debug technical problems quickly and efficiently.
• Prioritise, plan and manage the time of assigned tasks with minimal oversight.
• Collaborate on technical direction and develop innovative solutions for difficult animation problems.
• Mentor junior members of the Animation Programming team and communicate clearly with other team members with minimal external help.
• Help educate and support other teams to correctly and efficiently use animation systems.
• Use appropriate data structures and algorithms to maximize efficiency (for both development time and runtime performance).
• Be vigilant for and report new problems, delays and risks to the appropriate Lead/Director.
• Seek support from higher level management when required.

Requirements

• 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.
• Able to tune animation systems based on high level design input with minimal assistance.
• Strong communication skills, comfortable working across teams and mentoring staff.
• Extensive algorithm and data structure skills (including time & space complexity and real-world vs theoretical performance).
• Able to understand and utilize multi-threading primitives & high-level networking concepts.
• Capable of reading and quickly understanding complex code.
• Self-motivated and driven to creatively solve problems.
• Able to plan an entire sub-system including external dependencies with minimal input.
• 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.