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Technical Animator

Founded in early 2019, Sumo Leamington is a member of the award-winning Sumo Digital family. We’re one of Sumo’s nine game development studios located across the UK and India, and our goal is to build and grow an industry-leading team here in Royal Leamington Spa.

Managed by industry veterans with ground-breaking titles under their belts, the studio needs to hire the right colleagues to meet our exciting objectives. Whether you’re an industry veteran or straight out of university, we could have a career-defining role for you. If you want to create great games that people will play for years to come, and be there at the beginning of something we know will be truly special, join our team. We look forward to speaking with you!

It’s an exciting time to be part of Sumo Leamington, winners of the Develop: Star Awards 2019 Best Studio and GI Biz 2020 Best Places to Work: Diversity Award; big things are on the horizon and we want you to be part of our continued journey. Join us!

Sumo Leamington is made up of a diverse mix of fantastic people, although sometimes, some groups are still under-represented. We are working to remove obstacles that can make it difficult for those groups to progress their careers in the games industry. We welcome applications from under-represented people in the gaming industry, including, but not limited to BAME, LGBQT+, women, people with physical disabilities, neurodiversity or mental health issues, and parents or carers.

In the role of Technical Animator, you are responsible for ensuring that all animation happens with ease. You’ll be solving technical challenges in creating animation for games. Where movements are too complex, for example, they can slow a game down. Or they can take so long to create, that the game becomes too expensive to make. You will be responsible for our motion pipeline from creating custom rigs, optimising workflows with scripts, writing custom tools to keyframe animation.

As a Technical Animator, you will be supporting the needs of the animators by ensuring they have the tools they need to do their jobs. As well as pushing the animation fidelity, you will be controlling the animation pipelines on our games to help us achieve stunning results, whilst keeping efficiency at its peak. The Technical Animator works with both in-house animators and external partners, as well as our engineers. Sharing knowledge, producing technical documents and guidelines is an important part of the role too. As an experienced animator, you will be creating the backbone of the games motion pipeline, by working closely with designers and art directors to previz and conceptualise the movements of the game to help sell the vision of the game to the team and our partners alike.

We're looking for someone who has a broad range of skills and a lot of industry experience, by understanding and executing animation (keyframes and mocap) you will spot potential animation problems, research new technologies, have conversations and find solutions. We're looking for someone who has an open and approachable persona with excellent communication skills to help mentor and guide the rest of the art team through practical demonstration. Applicants should have a deep technical understanding of game engines and have previous experience allowing them to own the animation pipeline from source to engine (expertise in Unity is a must). Most of all, we're looking for someone with a positive, can-do attitude.

As part of the Sumo Digital family, we’re able to offer a super benefits package including generous holidays and flexible working hours. Further perks include our legendary annual Sumo Big Day Out, plus epic Christmas parties, vouchers on your birthday and free fruit for everyone! Our new, regular studio Game Jams are a highlight - staff spend a full day developing and pitching their own game ideas for possible development by Sumo (this led to the recently released Snake Pass, so it’s a genuine commitment to allowing staff to pitch ideas upwards to the highest levels).

Our environment is relaxed, friendly and built upon the basis of every team member having the opportunity to shine and have a realisable input into the games we create. We’re in the amazing position of building a brand new team, and creating a studio culture that’s all about passion, respect, diversity, fun and togetherness. We’re looking for people that love what they do and love to share their enthusiasm with each other.