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Salary: USD 71,000 - 123,000 / annual
Ghost Story Games, founded by Ken Levine (creative director of System Shock 2, BioShock, and BioShock Infinite) and former Irrational Games developers, is seeking a Cinematic Technical Animator to join the team on Judas, a narrative-driven game built on novel technology that dynamically adapts the visual world, gameplay, and story to each player's experience.
In this role, you will design extensible pipelines and tooling for cinematic and narrative content, enabling cross-disciplinary teams to deliver high-quality experiences with minimal engineering support. You will lead efforts involving animation blueprints, animation montages, level sequences, and blueprint scripting to support both gameplay and cinematic goals. You'll provide technical direction for character animation integration and runtime control, focusing on improving emotional fidelity and storytelling impact.
You will collaborate closely with audio, lighting, animation, and narrative design teams to build systems that unify presentation layers and enhance dramatic storytelling. You'll drive performance optimization, reliability, and scalability of all cinematic systems to support long-term project goals and creative iteration.
The role requires the ability to work independently to diagnose and proactively resolve problems while collaborating effectively with the animation team and cross-functional partners. You should be able to receive feedback, learn from it, and work within a schedule to deliver effectively to deadlines.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 2+ years of development experience in the game industry with recent hands-on implementation experience
- Strong understanding of timing and pacing of narrative delivery
- Contributed to at least one shipped title recognized for its strong narrative and/or mission design
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and organizational skills
- Excellent visual scripting and/or programming skills
- Strong investigative and debugging skills
- Passion for narrative first-person shooters
- Experience with task/bug-tracking software and pipelines
- Experience with Perforce or similar version control software
