Sr. Animation Engineer - Core Tech

Description

Who We Are: 
The Core Technology group at 2K is filled with some of the brightest minds in the business, whose expertise is routinely called upon by the studios behind Civilization, Borderlands, Evolve, and others.  When some of the best studios in the world ask for advice, only the best in the field can answer.  We fill our team with those who can answer the call, those who thrive working on custom engines, critical shared technology, leading tools and middleware, and those who can research the tools we’ll need to use tomorrow.  Core Technology is a forward-thinking group of experts who handle the challenge of supporting multiple products, platforms and studios, while at the same time anticipating the needs of tomorrow.  If you’re a top-tier expert who wants to build something great, come join our team.

What We Need: 
2K is looking for a talented Senior Animation Engineer to help us in developing advanced animation systems for our future titles and studios. You should have strong coding skills, a good knowledge and interest in character animation systems, and passion for realistic, high quality character and vehicle motion. 

Job Responsibilities Include:
•    Analyze, guide and support studio runtime animation systems, pipeline and tools
•    Work closely with studio animation technology teams to realize product design goals
•    Understand and communicate well designed, robust, highly optimal new animation system features, helping integrate them into existing animation, physics and AI systems
•    Keep up to date with the latest academic and industry breakthroughs, independently research and develop improvements to continuously push animation technology forward

Who we think will be a great fit:
We are looking for some with a deep and intuitive knowledge of mathematics relevant to animation, as well as the relevant data structures and algorithms. You’ll also need to have a familiarity with the state of the art in game animation systems and their execution at a CPU/GPU level on console platforms. We are looking for excellent technical analysis and communication skills, someone who can walk into an unfamiliar codebase in the middle of production and quickly and effectively diagnose a performance problem or potential area of improvement.

Requirements:
•    5+ years of prior experience of hands on experience on animation systems for shipping AAA titles 
•    Experience with high-performance coding on contemporary game platforms
•    Expert in 3D animation and 3D math
•    Basic knowledge of player and AI systems (state machines, behavior trees, input handling, etc.)
•    Experience with 3D character and/or vehicle animation systems including skeletal animation
•    Knowledge of skinning and morph target technology
•    Experience with using IK, blending, and motion capture data in games
•    Performance minded development and optimization skills with results oriented approaches and thinking
•    Must be able to communicate and work well with a team of similarly passionate and skilled individuals
•    Strong communication and proficiency working with technical artists to develop and iterate on features/tools