Senior Animation Engineer | Unity3D | Remote | Stylized Games

Senior Animation Engineer | Unity3D | Remote | Stylized Games

Position Overview

Beffio is looking for an experienced Senior Animation Engineer to join a major game project developed in Unity3D.

This role sits between Animation, Technical Art, and Engineering, focusing on the technology, runtime systems, and tools behind high-quality character animation.

We are looking for someone who understands animation as both a creative workflow and a technical system. You should be comfortable working with animators on controllers, rigs, and pipelines while also discussing runtime architecture, ECS/DOTS, GPU skinning, shaders, performance, and C# implementation with engineers.

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant R&D and technical ownership, taking ideas from early prototypes through production-ready systems that can be used and maintained by the wider team.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and optimize animation runtime systems in Unity.
• Work with state machines, blend trees, layers, masks, root motion, animation events, and compression.
• Develop or integrate data-oriented animation solutions using ECS/DOTS, Jobs, Burst, and baking workflows.
• Explore GPU skinning, deformation, compute shaders, vertex shaders, and vertex animation techniques.
• Build Unity editor tools, validators, asset processors, and production workflows for animation teams.
• Support rigging, skeleton, skinning, and FBX workflows between Maya or Blender and Unity.
• Profile and optimize animation systems across mobile hardware.
• Collaborate closely with Animators, Technical Artists, Gameplay Engineers, and Rendering Engineers.
• Take technical R&D from prototype to production-ready feature.
• Establish clean documentation, workflows, and technical standards for the wider team.

Requirements

• Strong C# and Unity engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with ECS/DOTS, including Entities, Burst, Jobs, and baking, or deep equivalent data-oriented engine experience.
• Strong understanding of animation runtimes including state machines, blend trees, layers, masks, root motion, events, and animation compression.
• Experience with GPU skinning and deformation using structured or constant buffers, compute shaders, vertex shaders, or similar techniques.
• Shader development experience in HLSL and a node-based tool such as Shader Graph or Amplify.
• Practical knowledge of character rigs, skeletons, skinning, and FBX pipelines in Maya, Blender, or similar tools.
• Experience creating Unity editor tools such as asset postprocessors, validators, custom inspectors, or editor windows.
• Experience profiling and optimizing mobile graphics workloads, particularly on Adreno and Mali hardware.
• Familiarity with GLES and Vulkan.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate with both artists and engineers.
• Fluent English.

Nice to Have

• Experience with DOTS animation frameworks such as Rukhanka, Latios Kinemation, or similar technology.
• Experience building or extending a custom animation runtime.
• Networked animation involving prediction and rollback.
• Netcode for Entities or similar multiplayer technology.
• Procedural animation including IK, secondary motion, or physics-driven layers.
• Facial animation systems using blendshapes, bones, textures, or hybrid approaches.
• Crowd animation systems including animation LOD, VAT, or update throttling.
• Experience developing animation systems for mobile or other performance-constrained platforms.

Ownership

We are looking for someone who can:

• Take R&D from an initial technical spike through to a shipped production feature.
• Independently drive complex technical investigations and make pragmatic architectural decisions.
• Balance animation quality, performance, complexity, and usability.
• Create systems and standards that others can confidently build upon.
• Be equally comfortable reviewing an animator's controller and an engineer's pull request.
• Work closely with artists rather than treating animation as purely an engineering problem.

What We Offer

• Meaningful ownership over animation technology on a major Unity3D game project.
• Direct collaboration with experienced Animators, Technical Artists, Engineers, and discipline leads.
• The opportunity to work on complex technical R&D and turn it into production systems.
• A highly collaborative international team.
• Fully remote work.
• Flexible contract options depending on location.
• Competitive compensation based on experience and contract structure.
• Annual Beffio team retreats.
• The possibility of long-term collaboration as the project grows.