Electronic Arts

Central Technology is a dynamic community of experts, innovators, and change-makers united by a single, shared vision: To revolutionize interactive entertainment and inspire creativity through transformative technology. Our industry-leading services and solutions are developed collaboratively with teams across EA to enhance creativity and improve outcomes for our partners and players.

The Creative Innovation team within the Central Technology organization is the driving force behind EA's cutting-edge research, 3rd-party partnerships, and content creation technologies. From AI-powered tools for character animation to groundbreaking world-building systems, this team researches, innovates, and integrates transformative technologies into creative workflows. By joining Creative Innovation, you'll work at the intersection of creativity, technology, and design solutions that redefine immersive gaming experiences. If you're looking for a team that combines the agility of a startup with the impact of a global AAA, then we're looking for you.

 Our team within Creative Innovation pioneers the use of Character technologies to empower content creators to create compelling games. You will be a senior member of this team reporting to its Principal Technical Art Director. This role includes managing a small team of technical artists.

This is a hybrid role (3 days per week in the office).

The Challenge Ahead
We are at the forefront of character tools development for flagship titles like Battlefield and our sports franchises. You will work with game team partners and product managers to evolve our character creation pipelines, applying AI to boost quality and the artist experience for hundreds of creators.

What You'll Do

• Establish the technical vision and long-term roadmap for character tools and pipelines, ensuring our architecture provides a scalable competitive advantage across multiple important franchises. Manage architecture and design decisions, and align teams to constraints like quality, schedule, platform, and production realities.
• Turn creative and product needs into requirements and plans. Gather inputs, assess feasibility, manage scope, and align multiple teams on execution in partnership with a Senior Project/Product Manager.
• Work with game team partners and Character artists, animators, and riggers (local and remote) to dig into workflow and production issues and negotiate tradeoffs to deliver practical tooling and pipeline improvements. Connect the dots between teams character needs and Creative Innovations business strategies
• Direct the design, implementation and support of production tooling for Character creation workflows, with a focus on usability, iteration speed, reliability, and maintainability.
• Define and guide quality and sustainability through standards, code/data/workflow reviews, test strategy and automation, and preventative practices based on production insights.
• Manage risks and dependencies across toolsets and domains. Surface mitigation plans to minimize or eliminate exposure

Who You Are

• Experienced technical art leader with 10+ years (or equivalent) who has owned end-to-end design and architecture and can make tradeoffs to deliver.
• Tools and pipeline developer with production experience across DCC workflows (Maya, Houdini, Substance Suite, Blender) and game content creation or pipeline management.
• Advanced coding skills, especially in Python, with experience building production-ready tooling for character creation and animation pipelines
• Experience applying Generative AI / Machine Learning techniques to automation, content pipelines, or tooling.
• Production experience with a game engine, and comfortable working in modern development environments, including containerized workflows like Docker in development.
• Quality-focused and, with experience driving debugging and root-cause analysis, preventative practices, test strategy and automation, and coding standards.
• Understanding of evolving industry standards (such as USD, MaterialX, or glTF) and their role in creating modular, non-destructive, and interoperable content pipelines that scale across multi-studio productions.
• Collaborative and able to bridge artists and engineers, align partners, mentor others, and scale through standards, reviews, and knowledge sharing.