Electronic Arts

EA SPORTS is one of the most iconic brands in entertainment – connecting hundreds of millions around the world to the sports they love through a portfolio of industry-leading video games.

EA SPORTS Tech provides specialized technology teams working on modern character articulation and motion, content pipelines and workflows, machine learning, game security, dev ops, as well as long lead feature and technology development for all EA SPORTS titles. As part of EA SPORTS Tech, the Initiatives Team pushes visual boundaries and experiences for our players. We invest in future technologies, shared tooling, and production workflows. We combine creativity and imagination with technical expertise. We are a diverse group that encourages team members to bring their unique perspectives and expertise to work every day.

About the Role:

Are you passionate about new technologies and continually pushing the boundaries of game development? Great, so are we! EA Sports Technical Art is seeking a Senior Rigging Technical Artist to partner with project leadership and our incredible team of Technical Artists to develop the next generation of content creation tools. The work you do will have a direct business impact to EA Sports and contribute to the foundation for future technology developments. 

Your Responsibilities:

As a Rigging Technical Artist you’ll help us to develop cutting-edge rigging-centric game features. In this role, you will be helping us pushing the boundaries of character deformation and solving some of the biggest unsolved avatar system challenges in real-time graphics with a senior team. Your responsibilities and tasks will include: character rigging, character deformation/simulation, helping to prototype workflows, asset maintenance, and driving script/tool development, as well as collaborating with our runtime engineers. TAs are expected to assume ownership of their content, and resolve technical or quality issues that arise.

Your Qualifications

• At least 5+ years of cinematic/games production experience working in technical art/rigging/animation.
• Knowledge of human anatomy and animation principles.
• Knowledge designing complex skeletons, control rigs, secondary animation.
• Experience with procedural rigging.
• Effective at communicating with different audiences: artists, engineers, managers.
• Highly organized and with a careful attention to detail.
• Proficient scripting/programming in Python 
• Experience with Autodesk Maya.
• A willingness to jump into the unknown and help solve new problems to resolve technical challenges and limitations.
• A Passion for Games!

Great To Have

• Experience with game engines (commercial or proprietary).
• Experience with Houdini and Vellum - Cloth/Muscle simulation. 
• Experience with Git and code review.
• Experience with / understanding of 3D mathematics.
• Familiarity with motion capture (data + acquisition).
• knowledge of Houdini VEX/Hscript a bonus.