As a Senior Unity VFX/Animator, you will have a strong understanding of animation principles and be able to use a range of techniques to drive high quality visuals and bring our games to life. You will confidently and respectfully challenge the status quo in order to improve things. Assertive when needed, you voice concerns, generate ideas for improvements, and stay on the cutting edge of animation technology and technique. Confident in your decision making, you nevertheless think carefully before you speak and act.
Job purpose
The Senior Animator is a highly skilled individual with excellent animation judgment and organizational skills to deliver the highest standard animation. They are excellent at communicating both up and down, estimating and costing work.
They are proactive, organized and methodical. They provide critical support to the project with a deep understanding of process, pipeline and platform requirements. They communicate between disciplines, proactively solving problems and fostering good relationships across team and studio.
The Senior Animator will be a skilled, flexible team player that effectively time handles themselves to deliver the results required by the Lead UX Designer to specification, quality and on time.
This role will work closely with the Lead UX Designer to set the quality bar and style for animations and to document any style guides or production processes in support of that goal. They will be expected to be able to perform the production duties of their specialism at a Senior Level, setting the animation style and quality bar for a team. They help mentor, inspire, and motivate their team.
KEY ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Produce expert quality animation and work with the Lead UX Designer to create and document the animation style for the project.
- Using your creativity and imagination to make appealing animations for our games.
- Expert knowledge of Unity and the ability to create particle effects for mobile platforms with optimizations.
- Implementation and testing of layouts and animations in game.
- Animating game assets using Spine.
- Demonstrate excellent planning and task scheduling, to deliver animation to required quality, specification and time.
- Demonstrate expert understanding of how animation supports gameplay and narrative with the ability to communicate these links to the team.
Essential requirements:
- Direct experience of all stages of game development on multiple projects, enabling sound, strategic judgements and providing excellent advice across the team.
- Proven experience of planning and managing delivery within the discipline.
- Proven experience of elevating team’s morale and supporting other artists where needed.
- Proven ability to work on business level tasks, e.g. cross discipline pipeline development.
- Excellent showreel.
- Deep understanding of Unity’s particle system.
Nice to Have:
- Experience creating animations with C# is beneficial
- Experience with DoTween, or other code based animation tools , a huge bonus
***PLEASE INCLUDE LINK TO PORTFOLIO WITH APPLICATION TO BE CONSIDERED***
What we offer you:
- Competitive salary, bonus plan, Zynga RSU’s (Restricted Stock Units), ESPP (Employee Stock Purchase Plan)
- RRSP Company Match Contribution
- Extended Health coverage, dental, disability, critical illness, EAP, and life insurance
- Virtual mental health and neurodiversity support programs
- Goodlife fitness annual membership
- Open vacation policy
- Family planning support program
- Generous paid maternity/parental leave
- Subsidized Back-up child care
- Zynga happy hours and frequent employee events
- Casual dress every single day
- Culture of diversity and inclusion including employee resource groups
- Work with cool people and impact millions of daily players
Zynga is an equal opportunity employer. We are proud of our diverse community; we do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, disability, or any other class or characteristic protected by applicable law. We welcome candidates, players, employees, and partners from all backgrounds. Join us!
Zynga will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.
Zynga is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with disabilities. If you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let us know.
