Technical Art Director

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