Animation Programmer

Avalanche Studios Group is hiring an Animation Programmer for our central technology organization in Stockholm. Central Tech is our core technology team and we innovate in areas that push the boundaries for what open-world sandbox gaming means as well as improve, optimize and support our existing core technology. As an Animation Programmer you will get the opportunity to push animation quality a lot further than we have done previously and help take our animation technology to the bleeding edge.

Sounds like fun to you? Do you feel you have the skills for this? Then we would love to hear from you!

The Position

As an Animation System Programmer you will develop and maintain both tools and runtime systems required to realize the vision for animation on the project. You should be able to understand the pros and cons of different approaches and be able to come up with new creative solutions to efficiently be able to achieve the desired quality.

The position also includes architecting the interfaces between the animation system and e.g. AI. Use and extend existing systems when possible, build new tools and features when needed. Assist animators in translating game design into technical animation design, help and educate game programmers working with animation related features and aid technical animators in implementing animations into the game. You will join our engineers in developing and maintaining our proprietary Apex Engine.

It is expected that you see your responsibility as delivering a successful end-user experience, together with your teammates. Much of the success of well-executed game characters is down to how successfully they are integrated with all of the systems within the game engine, e.g. physics, animation, UI, SFX, VFX, dialog, etc. Previous experience and proven ability to work with multiple systems and stakeholders is a definite advantage. Finally, as with any other programming role, you will have to be able to balance functional requirements with technical requirements in the areas of performance, stability, memory usage, and interoperability.

Required Qualifications:

- A keen eye for Animation and ability to write readable, robust and performant code in C/C++

- Solid knowledge of game animation systems e.g. layering, masking, state machines, locomotion, facial animations, blending, and parameterization

- Experience working with IK, ragdolls and / or other procedural techniques

Desired Qualifications:

- Experience in networking animated characters

- Experience with motion synthesis/generation

- Experience with machine learning for animation

- Experience working with game physics

- Experience of profiling and optimization