Pickford AI logo
Pickford AI

Bending the form-factor of narrative — allowing us to entertain, educate and inspire in previously unimaginable ways.

Technical Art Director

Location

California

Posted

2 days ago

Salary

0

Seniority

Lead

10 yrs expEnglishUnreal Engine

Job Description

Technical Art Director

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.

Job 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.

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

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