Contract - Technical UI Designer - Unreal Engine & RIVE Specialist

Mob Entertainment is a startup multimedia studio that is best known for our hit indie horror game "Poppy Playtime".  This franchise is one of the hottest new properties in gaming, and our team is naturally expanding as our ambition expands.  To give a taste of our brand's popularity, more than 100 billion YouTube views of Poppy Playtime related content have occured since the game's launch 4 years ago. 

Mob Entertainment is seeking a Technical UI Designer with strong expertise in both Unreal Engine and Rive to join our team on a contract basis for our next release. This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior-level designer or technical designer who can own the technical implementation of animated and interactive UI systems—ensuring that everything from HUDs to menus to in-world overlays work smoothly, look great, and are performant under the hood.

This position sits at the intersection of design, animation, and engineering, with a heavy emphasis on integrating Rive animations into Unreal Engine using UMG and Blueprints. You’ll be responsible for making sure Rive assets function as intended, are efficiently implemented, and are tightly synced with gameplay logic, inputs, and UI state machines.

Responsibilities

• Integrate and manage Rive-based UI animations across menus, HUDs, and in-world widgets using Unreal Engine’s UMG system.
• Collaborate with UI/UX Designers and UI Artists to bring interactive UI animations to life in a way that is responsive, performant, and gameplay-aware.
• Build and maintain widget blueprints, animation triggers, event bindings, and input handling logic for all game UI elements.
• Own the technical pipeline for Rive UI assets, ensuring naming conventions, state machine logic, export settings, and runtime performance are consistently upheld.
• Create reusable widget components and modular systems that streamline integration of Rive into gameplay-driven UI workflows.
• Implement and maintain Enhanced Input compatibility for UI navigation across keyboard, mouse, and gamepad.
• Troubleshoot and resolve input bugs, sync issues, state transition failures, and any playback inconsistencies related to Rive animations.
• Optimize UI systems for draw calls, tick rate, animation memory, and runtime performance across platforms.
• Document implementation standards for Rive-based UI and support other team members in integrating or extending systems as needed.
  
  

Requirements

• Proficiency in Unreal Engine, with experience working directly in UMG, Blueprints, and Enhanced Input.
• Strong real-world experience using Rive—including building or integrating interactive state machines, working with multiple animation tracks, and resolving animation logic bugs.
• Experience implementing animated, responsive UI components that react to gameplay events, player input, and internal UI states.
• Working knowledge of performance bottlenecks specific to UI (tick cost, render layering, CPU/GPU overhead).
• Experience building and managing data-driven UI components, including health bars, popups, action prompts, and animated HUDs.
• Solid understanding of UI architecture, lifecycle events, and state management in Unreal Engine.
• Comfortable collaborating with designers and animators to translate visual ideas into engine-ready technical solutions.
• Strong documentation and debugging skills; able to diagnose both visual and logic-related UI issues.
  
  

Pluses

• Experience extending or customizing Rive runtime behavior, especially in game engines.
• Familiarity with retro or pixel-art UI integration, particularly when combining animated overlays with clean player feedback.
• Knowledge of procedural or systemic UI generation, especially when paired with animated feedback.
• Experience syncing Rive UI with networked or multiplayer game states.
• Familiarity with motion design principles for game-centric UI/UX.
  
  

Performance Expectations

• Deliver polished, responsive, and stable Rive-driven UI systems that meet gameplay needs and technical constraints.
• Build a scalable and maintainable Rive UI pipeline that other team members can follow.
• Maintain visual consistency, performance standards, and systemic flexibility across all UI components.
• Collaborate cross-discipline to ensure that UI behavior matches the game’s tone, pacing, and player expectations.
  
  

Reporting & Oversight

• Reports to: Game Director, UI Lead & Engineering Lead
• Works closely with: UI/UX Designers, Animators, Gameplay Engineers, and Technical Designers
• Communication Tools: Unreal Engine, Slack, Jira, Confluence, Figma, Rive
  
  

If you're a Rive-savvy technical designer who loves making animated UI systems work beautifully inside Unreal, and you thrive on solving the tricky stuff others avoid, we want to hear from you.

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Mob Entertainment is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or religious creed, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, marital status, family or parental status, disability, military or veteran status, or any other basis protected by law. All employment decisions are based on a person’s merit, business needs, and role requirements. If you require further accommodations or have questions regarding accessibility of our roles, please reach out to info@mobentertainment.com