Technical Director - Animation

Technical Director - Animation Company Overview: LEGO Digital Play will bring the LEGO brand into digital entertainment in new, innovative, and wholly-owned ways. Our mission is to ensure the LEGO Brand remains as powerfully a part of children’s lives in the coming decades as it has ever been. We aim to reach every kid on the planet, their parents, and adult fans of LEGO—and provide them with meaningful, magical, and playful new experiences. We are at the earliest phases of this new company, offering a unique opportunity to build a new entity for the world's most beloved and trusted brand. Our culture is open, collaborative, intellectually rigorous, and creatively vibrant. Position Overview: LEGO Digital Play’s Platform Technology team is shaping the future of online creativity by taking inspiration from LEGO Brand’s “system in play,” and reimagining it for the future. Our platform is built on a foundation of safety that will ultimately “inspire the builders of tomorrow.” We are seeking a visionary Technical Director for Animation Systems, who is passionate about building systems for the next generation of creators that help unlock creators’ abilities to animate and move their characters in a world created in LEGO. This role will be expected to both deliver tangible products, experiments and initial MVPs on short time frames, while also innovating and creating the long-term animation systems for LEGO Digital Play’s ecosystem while aligning with the core LEGO values of Imagination, Creativity, Fun, Learning, Caring and Quality. Key Responsibilities: Lead the architecture and development of advanced character animation systems, extending the existing engine through both C++ and scripting frameworks to enable expressive, performant and scalable animation pipelines. Define the long-term technical vision for animation, ensuring the engine supports next-generation character expression, procedural animation, physics interaction and AI-driven behaviors. Collaborate closely with animation directors, technical artists, gameplay engineers, and designers to translate creative goals into robust technical systems that enable believable and emotionally resonant character performances. Implement core runtime animation systems, including state machines, animation graphs, blending systems, locomotion frameworks, rig interaction layers, and procedural animation capabilities. Extend and optimize the engine’s animation architecture to support large-scale content creation, high performance across platforms, and efficient iteration cycles for artists and designers. Establish scripting frameworks and APIs that empower content teams to build animation behaviors without requiring deep engine modifications. Drive performance optimization of animation systems, ensuring efficient CPU/GPU usage and scalability across target platforms. Partner with tools and pipeline teams to develop intuitive authoring workflows for animators and technical artists. Lead, mentor, and grow a team of animation engineers, establishing engineering standards, code quality practices, and architectural guidelines. Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies such as machine learning–driven animation, motion synthesis, procedural rigging, and real-time character simulation. Ensure tight integration between animation systems and gameplay systems, including physics, AI, networking, and interaction frameworks. Champion engineering excellence, including maintainable code architecture, documentation, testing practices and long-term system scalability Qualifications: Extensive experience in real-time graphics, game engine development, or interactive character systems, with significant focus on animation technologies. Deep expertise in C++ and experience designing large-scale engine systems for performance-critical environments. Strong experience with scripting systems used to extend game engines or animation frameworks. Proven experience designing and shipping character animation systems, including animation blending, locomotion systems, state machines, and procedural animation. Strong understanding of character rigging, skeletal animation, inverse kinematics (IK), motion matching, and animation graph architectures. Experience collaborating closely with animators, technical artists, and designers to deliver expressive character performance in real-time environments. Experience building scalable animation pipelines and content authoring workflows for large teams. Demonstrated leadership experience, including mentoring engineers and influencing cross-disciplinary teams. Strong systems architecture skills, with the ability to design extensible frameworks that support long-term product evolution. Experience optimizing animation systems for performance across multiple platforms. Familiarity with modern animation technologies, such as procedural animation, physics-based animation, and machine-learning-assisted animation workflows. Excellent communication skills, with the ability to bridge creative and engineering disciplines. What Success Looks Like: Established a robust and extensible animation architecture that empowers animators and designers to create rich character performances with minimal engineering friction. Delivered core runtime systems for animation graphs, locomotion frameworks, and procedural animation, supporting expressive and responsive character behavior. Created clear technical standards and engineering practices for animation systems development, ensuring maintainability and scalability. Built strong cross-functional partnerships with animation, design, and gameplay teams to ensure technology aligns with creative vision. Developed tools and scripting frameworks that significantly improve iteration speed and productivity for content creators. Mentored and elevated the animation engineering team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and creative collaboration. Positioned the animation platform to support future advancements such as machine-learning–driven animation, motion synthesis, and procedural performance systems. A platform architecture that supports scalable experiences and long-term global growth LEGO Digital Play is committed to inspiring and developing the builders of tomorrow - both in the physical and digital worlds. If you are passionate about shaping the future of interactive play through innovation, technology, AI, and programmable systems we invite you to come build the future with us! Department LEGO Digital Play Locations LEGO Digital Play London Office Remote status Hybrid