Technical Director – Animation at LEGO Digital Play
Company: LEGO Digital Play
Location: London, United Kingdom
Job Type: Hybrid, Full-Time
Salary: Not Disclosed
About the Company
LEGO Digital Play is bringing the LEGO brand into digital entertainment through innovative, wholly-owned experiences. The company’s mission is to inspire children, parents, and adult fans through meaningful, magical, and playful digital products. As a new entity, LEGO Digital Play offers a rare opportunity to shape the future of interactive play and creativity.
Job Overview
LEGO Digital Play is seeking a visionary Technical Director – Animation to lead the development of advanced character animation systems. This role combines hands-on engineering, strategic technical leadership, and cross-functional collaboration to create next-generation animation tools, systems, and pipelines.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead architecture and development of advanced character animation systems using C++ and scripting frameworks.
- Define the long-term technical vision for animation systems, procedural animation, physics interaction, and AI-driven behaviors.
- Collaborate with animation directors, gameplay engineers, technical artists, and designers.
- Implement runtime systems such as animation graphs, state machines, locomotion frameworks, and procedural animation.
- Optimize engine animation architecture for scalability and performance across platforms.
- Develop scripting frameworks and APIs for content teams.
- Drive CPU/GPU performance optimization of animation systems.
- Partner with tools and pipeline teams to improve workflows for animators and technical artists.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of animation engineers.
- Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies like machine learning-driven animation and real-time simulation.
- Ensure integration between animation, gameplay, AI, networking, and interaction systems.
- Champion engineering excellence, maintainable architecture, and documentation.
Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in game engine development, real-time graphics, or interactive character systems.
- Deep expertise in C++ and large-scale engine system design.
- Experience with scripting systems for animation frameworks and engines.
- Strong background in animation blending, locomotion systems, state machines, and procedural animation.
- Understanding of character rigging, skeletal animation, IK, motion matching, and animation graphs.
- Experience building scalable animation pipelines and workflows.
- Leadership experience mentoring engineers and influencing cross-functional teams.
- Strong architecture and optimization skills for multi-platform performance.
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
What Success Looks Like
- Build a robust and extensible animation architecture.
- Deliver core runtime systems for expressive and responsive character behaviors.
- Establish engineering standards and scalable development practices.
- Improve iteration speed and productivity for content creators.
- Mentor the engineering team and foster innovation.
- Support future advancements like ML-driven animation and motion synthesis.