Gameplay Animation Engineer (Unannounced Project)

We are looking for a Gameplay Engineer with experience and in-depth working knowledge of Unreal Engine's animation systems to work with tech artists, animators, and designers to breathe life into an immersive online world by expressing game state, player cues, emotion, and intent through animation.

In this role, you will work with designers and other gameplay engineers to provide a bridge between gameplay systems and animations, collaborating to build features related to locomotion, synced animations, interactable environment objects, npcs, creatures and more! You will leverage UE's animations systems fully and develop new systems when needed.

In bridging the gap between gameplay and animation you will also work with tech artists and animators to help build a robust animation pipeline and support systems for character customization and retargeting. Your expertise will be leveraged to help build, analyze, and review prototypes to explore new directions for our animators to take. Work will include tasks such as ensuring animations are efficiently loaded, setting up animation data effectively, and working to solve performance concerns.

As an experienced Unreal developer, you will share your knowledge with both veteran and junior teammates to guide them in learning best practices, gotchas, tips and tricks with the Unreal Engine. You will be a resource to them for questions, architectural advice, and general help where needed.

If you enjoy using your knowledge of UE's animation systems to build immersive experiences; If you are excited to be a force multiplier for a team of incredibly talented developers, removing the barriers that stand between an idea and an implementation, helping them to learn the Unreal Engine, this is the role for you!

About Our Team

The Engineering team at ArenaNet thrives on a wide array of perspectives, experiences, and interests. We know that the best creations come from healthy and friendly teams. Our work is woven together with the efforts of other disciplines and crafts within game development. We seek out voices and ideas that might be new to us. We are always on the lookout for ways to help each other, both within the Engineering team, and throughout the studio.

Who We Are Looking For

You, our ideal candidate, are an experienced gameplay engineer, well versed in the Unreal Engine's animation systems, and comfortable working in C++ on AAA games. You have an eye and intuition for the feel of locomotion systems, animation blending, and realistic physics related to characters. You have experience implementing and leveraging motion warping, additive animations, ragdoll features or you have knowledge of these systems and demonstrate the ability to ramp up on them quickly. You understand performance costs of animation and gameplay systems and how to diagnose, debug, and optimize them.

Cooperation and communication skills will, at this point in your career, be natural to you. You will be working closely with teammates and inter-department personnel with great attention to their needs, listening and hearing out points of view to fully understand design and art goals. You will be able to creatively synthesize solutions for those goals based on your experience and the capabilities of the engine.

Mentoring and teaching are activities that you take pleasure in as part of your day-to-day endeavors. You enjoy evangelizing best practices based on your experience with Unreal and respectfully guiding and mentoring teammates to fish at your level with the engine.

You are at home working together with non-technical colleagues to develop good practices, technical constraints, and team standards. You will always be endeavoring to improve processes, tools, and workflows to maintain the quality and stability of the work produced across disciplines in a fast-paced environment.