Character Technical Artist

Summary
We are seeking a skilled Character Technical Artist to join our team and support the development of high-quality, performant characters for an all-new IP. This role sits at the intersection of art, animation, and engineering, ensuring that character assets are built, optimized, and implemented to the highest technical standards.

As a Character Technical Artist at Absurd Ventures, you will collaborate closely with Character Artists, Riggers, Animators, and Engineers to develop and maintain character pipelines, solve complex technical challenges, and help push the visual fidelity and performance of our characters in Unreal Engine.

Core Responsibilities 

• Partner with Character Artists to ensure character models meet technical, performance, and pipeline requirements.
• Support and maintain character pipelines spanning modeling, rigging, skinning, deformation, and engine implementation.
• Diagnose and resolve character-related technical issues, including geometry, skinning, deformation, LODs, and performance constraints.
• Collaborate closely with rigging and animation to ensure characters are animation-ready and behave correctly in-game.
• Implement and validate characters in Unreal Engine, ensuring correct setup for materials, LODs, cloth, and physics.
• Develop tools, scripts, and workflows to improve efficiency and consistency in character production.
• Create and maintain technical documentation for character pipelines, workflows, and best practices.
• Proactively identify risks related to character production, performance, or pipeline bottlenecks and communicate them clearly to Production and leadership.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to Character Artists and other content creators.

Core Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Character Technical Artist, Technical Artist, or similar role in the video game industry. Experience supporting character pipelines on at least one shipped AAA title.
• Experience with character rigging, facial rigs, or motion systems.
• Strong understanding of character modeling, topology, UVs, skinning, and deformation principles.
• Significant experience working in Unreal Engine (preferably UE5), including character setup, LODs, physics, Control Rig and optimization.
• Proficiency with industry-standard tools such as Maya and familiarity with Motion Builder, ZBrush and Substance Painter.
• Solid scripting or tool development experience (Python, MEL, Blueprint, or similar).
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to debug complex, cross-disciplinary issues.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset. 

Plus if…

• Familiarity with cloth, hair, or physics simulation workflows in Unreal Engine.
• Experience with performance profiling and optimization on console hardware.
• Previous experience establishing or evolving character pipelines on a large production.
• Familiarity with proprietary or custom engine pipelines.

Description

• Full-time job with benefits.
• Role is on-site in Santa Monica, CA.
• Office is located near downtown Santa Monica — near metro and freeways.

The base pay range for this position is $130,000 to $165,000 per year. Actual compensation is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. We also offer a competitive package of benefits including paid time off, sick time, company holidays, parental leave, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.

About Absurd Ventures
Absurd Ventures is a media company creating new IP across all platforms and for all formats. Absurd Ventures is building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.