Senior Animator - The Sims

Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Here, everyone is part of the story. Part of a community that connects across the globe. A place where creativity thrives, new perspectives are invited, and ideas matter. A team where everyone makes play happen.

Welcome to Maxis, home to tinkerers, craftspeople, & storytellers. Our drive is to inspire everyone to make a better world through creative play. As the developer of The Sims, we create games and experiences for millions of people around the world and are always looking for new ways to inspire our players. Maxis is a place where you can do what you love and help others grow while doing it; a place where your unique voice can be heard and seen. We put creativity and inclusivity at the core of our work and don't settle for seeing the world only as it is, but strive to build a world as it could be.

As a Senior Animator with Maxis, you will work with our art, animation, and tech teams to explore new workflows and technologies within the animation sphere of game development, including emerging tools and systems that enhance automation. This is a collaborative environment across multiple products focused on R&D to help improve the quality and quantity of the asset creation process. You will also present and guide other Sims members through the innovations and developments, offering your perspective, artistic opinions, and proposed workflow insertions. Overall, you will seek opportunities to enhance our games through surfacing and adopting modern technologies that harmonize with our unique products.

You will be reporting to the Development Director.

Responsibilities:

• Research
• Iterating and validating functionality of existing and upcoming animation systems
• Create temporary assets for the purpose of technical prototyping and research
• Assess the latest technologies to evaluate viability for The Sims franchise
• Open to emerging technology research and systems
• Partnership
• Improve upon team projects with our product partners
• Provide and translate feedback to our technical partners
• Represent and prioritize the interests of our partner teams through the lens of the animation craft
• Independently guide initiative progress and action items across partnering disciplines
• Supporting Tech
• Be an important partner in evaluating and testing new tools, workflows and pipeline systems in Maya, Unreal, and other tools for future development.
• Support Animation, Tech Animation and Tech Art across multiple prototypes, while targeting and advocating for the Animation vision across multiple products.
• Documentation / Communication
• Document R&D efforts of technical evaluations to entire teams
• Present work to members of the team at multiple levels.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years experience working in game development and content creation.
• Knowledge of stylized hand-keyed animation and motion capture clean up
• Collaborate across discipline peers
• Use and troubleshoot animation issues in Maya, Unreal, and in-game Engine
• Experience with pre-production through prototyping and R&D relating to development of animation tools and systems
• Experience overseeing animation systems from start to finish, as an animation customer in partnership with technical disciplines
• Understanding of documentation software like Miro, Coda, and Google Workspace
• History of promoting your ideas and gaining agreement across a larger audience
• Worked with designing and hooking up node-based systems (state machines)
• Experience in documentation of research and presenting to peers and animators.
• You enjoy exploration, research, and tinkering with technology.