Role Overview

Interpret Pickford’s company and product vision into clear, actionable art direction, technical standards, and production requirements.
Own the art pipeline end-to-end across characters, animation, environments, lighting, VFX, and related asset workflows.
Lead external art relationships, including contractor onboarding, briefs, reviews, feedback loops, delivery standards, and final asset acceptance.
Set and maintain quality standards for shipped art, ensuring characters and assets are visually appealing, compatible with our systems.
Drive animation quality across rigs, skeletons, retargeting, blends, locomotion, gestures, facial animation, and runtime playback.
Set timelines, scope, estimates, and resourcing needs for art production across internal and external contributors.
Partner with product and creative to ensure creative tools are intuitive, scalable, and useful for both professional creators and future UGC users.
Jump in hands-on with animation implementation, adjust workflows, prototype solutions, or unblock production.
Help evaluate, hire, and resource future art, technical art, animation, and external production needs.

Requirements

10+ years of professional experience working in Unreal Engine, ideally with UE5
Deep technical art experience, with a strong focus on character animation pipelines.
Strong understanding of animation systems, character rigs, skeletons, retargeting, blend spaces, animation blueprints, runtime animation, and performance constraints.
Proven experience managing external art teams, vendors, contractors, or co-development partners.
Ability to translate creative goals into technical requirements and production-ready standards.
Strong communication skills with artists, engineers, designers, producers, and non-technical stakeholders.
Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the pipeline may need to be invented rather than inherited.
Strong visual taste and the ability to articulate why something does or does not meet the bar.
Willingness to be hands-on when needed, not just oversee from a distance.
Experience leading or mentoring a small art, animation, or technical art team.
Shipped at 2+ AAA titles or equivalent high-end real-time 3D projects.
Experience with level design, lighting, cinematics, shaders, VFX, or environment art.
Experience designing tools for artists, creators, or procedural content workflows.
Comfortable collaborating on product design, UX, and creator-facing workflows.
Experience with AI, ML-driven animation, procedural animation, runtime character generation, or interactive storytelling systems.
Familiarity with MetaHumans, Control Rig, Sequencer, Niagara, Unreal animation systems, and runtime asset workflows.
Experience building scalable pipelines for UGC, live service games, virtual production, or real-time interactive media.

Tech Stack

Unreal Engine

Benefits

Competitive salary, stock, and benefits package
The space to work on truly crazy projects that will shape the future of media
The opportunity to closely collaborate with with amazing multidisciplinary talent – Hollywood creatives, world-class designers, superstar engineers, and incredible AI researchers
An environment designed to let everyone collaborate and be included no matter what specialty you previously had
Unique professional growth opportunities built directly into our development process

Pickford AI

Open Positions (1)

Design

Technical Art Director