Senior Technical Art Director - Characters
Top Benefits
About the role
###General Information
Locations: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Role ID
212481
Worker Type
Regular Employee
Studio/Department
CT - Creative Innovation
Work Model
Hybrid
###Description & Requirements
Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Here, everyone is part of the story. Part of a community that connects across the globe. A place where creativity thrives, new perspectives are invited, and ideas matter. A team where everyone makes play happen.
Central Technologyis a dynamic community of experts, innovators, and change-makers united by a single, shared vision: To revolutionize interactive entertainment and inspire creativity through transformative technology. Our industry-leading services and solutions are developed collaboratively with teams across EA to enhance creativity and improve outcomes for our partners and players.
TheCreative Innovationteam within the Central Technology organization is the driving force behind EA's cutting-edge research, 3rd-party partnerships, and content creation technologies. From AI-powered tools for character animation to groundbreaking world-building systems, this team researches, innovates, and integrates transformative technologies into creative workflows. By joining Creative Innovation, you'll work at the intersection of creativity, technology, and design solutions that redefine immersive gaming experiences. If you're looking for a team that combines the agility of a startup with the impact of a global AAA, then we're looking for you.
Our team within Creative Innovation pioneers the use of Character technologies to empower content creators to create compelling games. You will be a senior member of this team reporting to its Principal Technical Art Director. This role includes managing a small team of technical artists.
This is a hybrid role (3 days per week in the office).
The Challenge Ahead We are at the forefront of character tools development for flagship titles likeBattlefieldand our sports franchises. You will work with game team partners and product managers to evolve our character creation pipelines, applying AI to boost quality and the artist experience for hundreds of creators.
What You'll Do
- Establish the technical vision and long-term roadmap for character tools and pipelines, ensuring our architecture provides a scalable competitive advantage across multiple important franchises. Manage architecture and design decisions, and align teams to constraints like quality, schedule, platform, and production realities.
- Turn creative and product needs into requirements and plans. Gather inputs, assess feasibility, manage scope, and align multiple teams on execution in partnership with a Senior Project/Product Manager.
- Work with game team partners and Character artists, animators, and riggers (local and remote) to dig into workflow and production issues and negotiate tradeoffs to deliver practical tooling and pipeline improvements. Connect the dots between teams character needs and Creative Innovations business strategies
- Direct the design, implementation and support of production tooling for Character creation workflows, with a focus on usability, iteration speed, reliability, and maintainability.
- Define and guide quality and sustainability through standards, code/data/workflow reviews, test strategy and automation, and preventative practices based on production insights.
- Manage risks and dependencies across toolsets and domains. Surface mitigation plans to minimize or eliminate exposure
Who You Are
- Experienced technical art leader with 10+ years (or equivalent) who has owned end-to-end design and architecture and can make tradeoffs to deliver.
- Tools and pipeline developer with production experience across DCC workflows (Maya, Houdini, Substance Suite, Blender) and game content creation or pipeline management.
- Advanced coding skills, especially in Python, with experience building production-ready tooling for character creation and animation pipelines
- Experience applying Generative AI / Machine Learning techniques to automation, content pipelines, or tooling.
- Production experience with a game engine, and comfortable working in modern development environments, including containerized workflows like Docker in development.
- Quality-focused and, with experience driving debugging and root-cause analysis, preventative practices, test strategy and automation, and coding standards.
- Understanding of evolving industry standards (such as USD, MaterialX, or glTF) and their role in creating modular, non-destructive, and interoperable content pipelines that scale across multi-studio productions.
- Collaborative and able to bridge artists and engineers, align partners, mentor others, and scale through standards, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
Pay Transparency - North America
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS
The ranges listed below are what EA in good faith expects to pay applicants for this role in these locations at the time of this posting. If you reside in a different location, a recruiter will advise on the applicable range and benefits. Pay offered will be determined based on a number of relevant business and candidate factors (e.g. education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, or business needs).
PAY RANGES
*British Columbia (depending on location e.g. Vancouver vs. Victoria) *$165,900 - $238,100 CAD
Pay is just one part of the overall compensation at EA.
For Canada, we offer a package of benefits including vacation (3 weeks per year to start), 10 days per year of sick time, paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when you welcome a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave), extended health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.
About Electronic Arts
We’re proud to have an extensive portfolio of games and experiences, locations around the world, and opportunities across EA. We value adaptability, resilience, creativity, and curiosity. From leadership that brings out your potential, to creating space for learning and experimenting, we empower you to do great work and pursue opportunities for growth.
We adopt a holistic approach to our benefits programs, emphasizing physical, emotional, financial, career, and community wellness to support a balanced life. Our packages are tailored to meet local needs and may include healthcare coverage, mental well-being support, retirement savings, paid time off, family leaves, complimentary games, and more. We nurture environments where our teams can always bring their best to what they do.
Electronic Arts is an equal opportunity employer. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, religion, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital status, family status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We will also consider employment qualified applicants with criminal records in accordance with applicable law. EA also makes workplace accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities as required by applicable law.
About Electronic Arts
We exist to inspire the world to play. We put our people first, and we thrive off their diversity in our innovative technology and immersive storytelling. We're doing the work to give everyone the space to be their full selves while giving back to our community, no matter where you're working from. We're looking for problem-solvers, game-changers, innovators, dreamers, doers—people that are ready to move the needle and transform the future of gaming. Join us.
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Senior Technical Art Director - Characters
Top Benefits
About the role
###General Information
Locations: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Role ID
212481
Worker Type
Regular Employee
Studio/Department
CT - Creative Innovation
Work Model
Hybrid
###Description & Requirements
Electronic Arts creates next-level entertainment experiences that inspire players and fans around the world. Here, everyone is part of the story. Part of a community that connects across the globe. A place where creativity thrives, new perspectives are invited, and ideas matter. A team where everyone makes play happen.
Central Technologyis a dynamic community of experts, innovators, and change-makers united by a single, shared vision: To revolutionize interactive entertainment and inspire creativity through transformative technology. Our industry-leading services and solutions are developed collaboratively with teams across EA to enhance creativity and improve outcomes for our partners and players.
TheCreative Innovationteam within the Central Technology organization is the driving force behind EA's cutting-edge research, 3rd-party partnerships, and content creation technologies. From AI-powered tools for character animation to groundbreaking world-building systems, this team researches, innovates, and integrates transformative technologies into creative workflows. By joining Creative Innovation, you'll work at the intersection of creativity, technology, and design solutions that redefine immersive gaming experiences. If you're looking for a team that combines the agility of a startup with the impact of a global AAA, then we're looking for you.
Our team within Creative Innovation pioneers the use of Character technologies to empower content creators to create compelling games. You will be a senior member of this team reporting to its Principal Technical Art Director. This role includes managing a small team of technical artists.
This is a hybrid role (3 days per week in the office).
The Challenge Ahead We are at the forefront of character tools development for flagship titles likeBattlefieldand our sports franchises. You will work with game team partners and product managers to evolve our character creation pipelines, applying AI to boost quality and the artist experience for hundreds of creators.
What You'll Do
- Establish the technical vision and long-term roadmap for character tools and pipelines, ensuring our architecture provides a scalable competitive advantage across multiple important franchises. Manage architecture and design decisions, and align teams to constraints like quality, schedule, platform, and production realities.
- Turn creative and product needs into requirements and plans. Gather inputs, assess feasibility, manage scope, and align multiple teams on execution in partnership with a Senior Project/Product Manager.
- Work with game team partners and Character artists, animators, and riggers (local and remote) to dig into workflow and production issues and negotiate tradeoffs to deliver practical tooling and pipeline improvements. Connect the dots between teams character needs and Creative Innovations business strategies
- Direct the design, implementation and support of production tooling for Character creation workflows, with a focus on usability, iteration speed, reliability, and maintainability.
- Define and guide quality and sustainability through standards, code/data/workflow reviews, test strategy and automation, and preventative practices based on production insights.
- Manage risks and dependencies across toolsets and domains. Surface mitigation plans to minimize or eliminate exposure
Who You Are
- Experienced technical art leader with 10+ years (or equivalent) who has owned end-to-end design and architecture and can make tradeoffs to deliver.
- Tools and pipeline developer with production experience across DCC workflows (Maya, Houdini, Substance Suite, Blender) and game content creation or pipeline management.
- Advanced coding skills, especially in Python, with experience building production-ready tooling for character creation and animation pipelines
- Experience applying Generative AI / Machine Learning techniques to automation, content pipelines, or tooling.
- Production experience with a game engine, and comfortable working in modern development environments, including containerized workflows like Docker in development.
- Quality-focused and, with experience driving debugging and root-cause analysis, preventative practices, test strategy and automation, and coding standards.
- Understanding of evolving industry standards (such as USD, MaterialX, or glTF) and their role in creating modular, non-destructive, and interoperable content pipelines that scale across multi-studio productions.
- Collaborative and able to bridge artists and engineers, align partners, mentor others, and scale through standards, reviews, and knowledge sharing.
Pay Transparency - North America
COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS
The ranges listed below are what EA in good faith expects to pay applicants for this role in these locations at the time of this posting. If you reside in a different location, a recruiter will advise on the applicable range and benefits. Pay offered will be determined based on a number of relevant business and candidate factors (e.g. education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, or business needs).
PAY RANGES
*British Columbia (depending on location e.g. Vancouver vs. Victoria) *$165,900 - $238,100 CAD
Pay is just one part of the overall compensation at EA.
For Canada, we offer a package of benefits including vacation (3 weeks per year to start), 10 days per year of sick time, paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when you welcome a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave), extended health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.
About Electronic Arts
We’re proud to have an extensive portfolio of games and experiences, locations around the world, and opportunities across EA. We value adaptability, resilience, creativity, and curiosity. From leadership that brings out your potential, to creating space for learning and experimenting, we empower you to do great work and pursue opportunities for growth.
We adopt a holistic approach to our benefits programs, emphasizing physical, emotional, financial, career, and community wellness to support a balanced life. Our packages are tailored to meet local needs and may include healthcare coverage, mental well-being support, retirement savings, paid time off, family leaves, complimentary games, and more. We nurture environments where our teams can always bring their best to what they do.
Electronic Arts is an equal opportunity employer. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, genetic information, religion, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital status, family status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We will also consider employment qualified applicants with criminal records in accordance with applicable law. EA also makes workplace accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities as required by applicable law.
About Electronic Arts
We exist to inspire the world to play. We put our people first, and we thrive off their diversity in our innovative technology and immersive storytelling. We're doing the work to give everyone the space to be their full selves while giving back to our community, no matter where you're working from. We're looking for problem-solvers, game-changers, innovators, dreamers, doers—people that are ready to move the needle and transform the future of gaming. Join us.