Technical Art Director

🔥 10 minutes ago

🏄 California – Remote

🏄 California – Remote

⏰ Full Time

🔴 Lead

🧑‍🎨 Art Director

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Pickford AI

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

2 - 10 employees

Founded 2024

📱 Media

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Media • Artificial Intelligence

Pickford AI is an AI-driven interactive media platform that produces short episodic and live storytelling experiences across genres like mystery, comedy, and romance. The platform combines scripted episodes, user-influenced narratives, and AI-driven characters (e. g. , “you're the AI” scenarios) to create immersive audio/visual experiences and live story events. Pickford AI appears consumer-facing, focusing on serialized short-form content and interactive participation.

📋 Description

• Interpret Pickford’s company and product vision into clear, actionable art direction, technical standards, and production requirements. • Own the art pipeline end-to-end across characters, animation, environments, lighting, VFX, and related asset workflows. • Lead external art relationships, including contractor onboarding, briefs, reviews, feedback loops, delivery standards, and final asset acceptance. • Set and maintain quality standards for shipped art, ensuring characters and assets are visually appealing, compatible with our systems. • Drive animation quality across rigs, skeletons, retargeting, blends, locomotion, gestures, facial animation, and runtime playback. • Set timelines, scope, estimates, and resourcing needs for art production across internal and external contributors. • Partner with product and creative to ensure creative tools are intuitive, scalable, and useful for both professional creators and future UGC users. • Jump in hands-on with animation implementation, adjust workflows, prototype solutions, or unblock production. • Help evaluate, hire, and resource future art, technical art, animation, and external production needs.

🎯 Requirements

• 10+ years of professional experience working in Unreal Engine, ideally with UE5 • Deep technical art experience, with a strong focus on character animation pipelines. • Strong understanding of animation systems, character rigs, skeletons, retargeting, blend spaces, animation blueprints, runtime animation, and performance constraints. • Proven experience managing external art teams, vendors, contractors, or co-development partners. • Ability to translate creative goals into technical requirements and production-ready standards. • Strong communication skills with artists, engineers, designers, producers, and non-technical stakeholders. • Comfortable working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where the pipeline may need to be invented rather than inherited. • Strong visual taste and the ability to articulate why something does or does not meet the bar. • Willingness to be hands-on when needed, not just oversee from a distance. • Experience leading or mentoring a small art, animation, or technical art team. • Shipped at 2+ AAA titles or equivalent high-end real-time 3D projects. • Experience with level design, lighting, cinematics, shaders, VFX, or environment art. • Experience designing tools for artists, creators, or procedural content workflows. • Comfortable collaborating on product design, UX, and creator-facing workflows. • Experience with AI, ML-driven animation, procedural animation, runtime character generation, or interactive storytelling systems. • Familiarity with MetaHumans, Control Rig, Sequencer, Niagara, Unreal animation systems, and runtime asset workflows. • Experience building scalable pipelines for UGC, live service games, virtual production, or real-time interactive media.

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive salary, stock, and benefits package • The space to work on truly crazy projects that will shape the future of media • The opportunity to closely collaborate with with amazing multidisciplinary talent – Hollywood creatives, world-class designers, superstar engineers, and incredible AI researchers • An environment designed to let everyone collaborate and be included no matter what specialty you previously had • Unique professional growth opportunities built directly into our development process