Pickford AI

• 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.

Role Description We’re looking for a senior Technical Art Director to own the bridge between product, engineering, ML, design, and art. This role is for someone who can translate creative vision into a practical, scalable art pipeline. You’ll help define how our characters, animations, environments, and visual systems should look and function, while making sure the assets we receive from external artists are beautiful, performant, production-ready, and technically compatible with our systems. A major focus of this role will be animation: - Character rigs - Animation quality - Blending - Retargeting - Runtime performance - Ensuring our characters feel alive, attractive, expressive, and emotionally engaging You should be equally comfortable: - Giving creative feedback - Reviewing contractor work - Debugging a pipeline problem in Unreal - Sitting with engineers to design better tools for artists We’re a small team building something new, so this is not a purely managerial role. We need someone senior enough to set standards and direction, but hands-on enough to jump in when the pipeline breaks or the work needs to get shipped. Qualifications - 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 Requirements - 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 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 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

We’re an interactive, AI-driven entertainment platform (cloud-rendered, streamed to browser). We have Amplitude and Grafana in place but our instrumentation is incomplete and the two systems disagree on basic session counts. We need someone to fix the data foundation and build the dashboards we need to make product decisions. We have a detailed implementation spec ready — exact event names, properties, fire conditions, and dashboard definitions. This is execution work with a clear scope, not a discovery engagement. Approximate scope of project: 2 Weeks Rate (depending on experience): $55-75/hr What You’ll Do 1.     Audit our instrumentation. Reconcile session counts between Grafana (server-side) and Amplitude (client-side). Find why they disagree, document the cause, and establish which system is the source of truth for which metrics. 2.     Implement user identity and cohort tagging. Set up Amplitude user properties at first touch — UTM params, ad group/creative IDs, referrer, device, geo, acquisition cohort week, bucketed acquisition channel. 3.     Instrument core funnel events. 8 events covering landing page → CTA → experience load → first frame → session start/end → chat interaction → story progress. Mix of client-side (JS SDK) and server-side (HTTP API). 4.     Build retention dashboards. D1/D3/D7/D14/D30 retention curves, segmented by acquisition channel, device, first experience, and cohort week. 5.     Build journey visualizations. Amplitude Journeys charts showing full user flow from landing to return visit, with filtered views by channel, device, experience, and cohort.

We’re looking for a part-time paid social media contractor who knows how to turn creative ideas into measurable growth. In this role, you’ll own the execution and optimization of our paid social campaigns across platforms like Meta, TikTok, and others. This is a hands-on, performance-driven role. Some days you’ll be launching and iterating on campaigns; others, you’ll be analyzing performance data and refining targeting, messaging, and creative strategy. You’ll work closely with our team to translate a completely new kind of product into compelling, high-performing ads. We value people who are both creative and analytical—people who can test quickly, learn faster, and continuously improve results. Salary details: $4,000/month @ 2 days per week for an initial 1 month period. This may extend or expand over time.

Pickford is building the next generation of storytelling. We're building expressive interactive narratives, while preserving storytelling's historical foundation as a tight loop between audience and creator. Our focus on story quality and audience engagement means we get to work with truly exceptional creators. Our AI expertise has attracted world-class researchers. Together we're defining a new category of media. All of this comes together in a UGC platform where creators can build, share, and collaborate on living stories which can only be powered by AI. Position Overview: In this role, you’ll own the user facing layer, turning complex and new paradigms into beautiful and fun user experiences. You will function as both designer and developer, ensuring our unique storytelling platform has an interface that enables users to truly love what they are watching and creators to bring their stories to life. We want you to sweat the details and flex your creativity beyond traditional design paradigms. We value people who ask “How can we make this work?” and who enjoy building solutions that don’t have obvious blueprints. You’ll work closely with a small, multidisciplinary team of engineers and storytellers who are committed to building something genuinely new. We’re looking for a Front End Engineer who can function as both designer and implementer, with a strong mobile-first mindset.

Pickford is building the next generation of storytelling. We're building expressive interactive narratives, while preserving storytelling's historical foundation as a tight loop between audience and creator. Our focus story quality and audience engagement means we get to work with truly exceptional creators. Our AI expertise has attracted world-class researchers. Together we're defining a new category of media. All of this comes together in a UGC platform where creators can build, share, and collaborate on living stories which can only be powered by AI. Position Overview: We’re looking for a contract QA engineer who understands that many of the hardest bugs don’t show up in automation. In this role, you’ll focus on hands-on, experiential testing of a real-time interactive product, running scenarios repeatedly, probing edge cases, and catching qualitative issues that only emerge during extended or realistic use. You’ll work closely with engineers, product, and creative to help define what “working correctly” means from a user’s point of view. This is a great fit for someone who enjoys thoughtfully breaking systems, cares about user experience, and can translate messy behavior into clear, actionable bug reports. Estimated weekly commitment is 2-3 days, initially, with a strong path toward full-time employment. Rates vary between $35-40/hr depending on experience. Key Responsibilities: - Manually test live interactive experiences, focusing on core user flows, session continuity, and state consistency - Identify qualitative issues related to pacing, responsiveness, clarity, and overall experience, not just crashes - Write clear, concise bug reports with reliable repro steps and expected vs actual behavior - Help define and protect a small set of critical “must-not-break” flows - Collaborate with engineers to verify fixes and prevent regressions - Contribute to lightweight regression testing and smoke test plans - Assist with or suggest areas for basic automation or tooling improvements