Senior Animation Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Animation Engineer based in Italy. This is a senior technical role focused on the systems, tools, and technology behind high-quality character animation in a major Unity3D game project. You will work at the intersection of Animation, Technical Art, and Engineering, translating creative requirements into scalable technical solutions. The role combines animation runtime development with advanced areas such as ECS/DOTS, GPU skinning, shaders, deformation, and performance optimization. You will collaborate closely with Animators, Technical Artists, Gameplay Engineers, and Rendering Engineers in a highly collaborative environment. You will have significant ownership over technical R&D, taking ideas from early prototypes through to robust, production-ready features. The position offers the opportunity to influence animation workflows, tooling, architecture, and technical standards across the wider team. This is an ideal opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys solving complex technical challenges while staying closely connected to the creative side of game development. Accountabilities - Develop, maintain, and optimize animation runtime systems in Unity, including state machines, blend trees, layers, masks, root motion, animation events, and compression. - Design and integrate data-oriented animation solutions using ECS/DOTS, Entities, Jobs, Burst, and baking workflows. - Research and implement advanced animation technologies, including GPU skinning, deformation, compute shaders, vertex shaders, and vertex animation techniques. - Build Unity Editor tools, validators, asset processors, custom workflows, and production utilities that improve the efficiency of animation teams. - Support character rigging, skeleton, skinning, and FBX workflows between DCC tools such as Maya or Blender and Unity.

- Profile and optimize animation systems across mobile hardware, with particular attention to performance constraints on Adreno and Mali GPUs. - Collaborate closely with Animators, Technical Artists, Gameplay Engineers, Rendering Engineers, and other technical disciplines. - Lead technical investigations and take promising R&D concepts from initial prototypes through to production-ready and maintainable features. - Establish clear documentation, reusable workflows, technical standards, and systems that enable other team members to build confidently. - Balance animation quality, runtime performance, system complexity, and usability when making architectural and technical decisions. - Review and improve existing animation systems while remaining comfortable evaluating both creative animation workflows and engineering implementations. Requirements: - Strong professional experience with C# and Unity engineering. - Hands-on experience with ECS/DOTS, including Entities, Burst, Jobs, and baking, or deep equivalent experience with data-oriented engine architecture. - Strong understanding of animation runtimes, including state machines, blend trees, layers, masks, root motion, animation events, and compression. - Practical experience with GPU skinning and deformation using structured or constant buffers, compute shaders, vertex shaders, or comparable techniques. - Shader development experience using HLSL and a node-based tool such as Shader Graph, Amplify, or similar. - Solid understanding of character rigs, skeletons, skinning, and FBX pipelines using Maya, Blender, or comparable tools. - Experience creating Unity Editor tooling, including asset postprocessors, validators, custom inspectors, editor windows, and production automation tools. - Experience profiling and optimizing graphics and animation workloads on mobile platforms, particularly Adreno and Mali hardware.