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
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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