Animation Engineer (senior / Staff / Principal) - Remote Eligible

Animation Engineer

Gym Class is the top rated social sports game on Meta Quest - millions of downloads, 79,000+ reviews, and a 4.9-star rating. As we scale our flagship VR experience and expand to new platforms like mobile, we're hiring a talented, driven Animation Engineer to lead the future of character motion, responsiveness, and expressiveness across our ecosystem.

You'll own our Unity animation systems end-to-end, shipping high-impact improvements to real-time player avatars and AI-driven characters, while collaborating closely with gameplay, AI, animation, art, design, and our co-founders.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and ship real-time animation systems for VR and mobile avatars and AI characters in Unity.
• Architect core animation logic (state machines, blend trees) with clean integration of IK and procedural layers.
• Deliver believable movement via seamless transitions between clips, IK, physics/locomotion, and interaction cues.
• Optimize for performance at scale: utilize a variety of methods to hit frame-rate targets on a wide device range.
• Own the animation roadmap, making pragmatic quality-vs-velocity tradeoffs aligned to company goals and upcoming modes/features.
• Partner across disciplines (gameplay, AI, tech art) to land features end-to-end and ensure animation systems play nicely with game mechanics.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping games with Unity + C#.
• Proven delivery of runtime animation systems (Animator Graphs, state machines, blending/layering, events, root motion).
• Hands-on IK setup and runtime integration (e.g., Unity Animation Rigging, FinalIK, or custom).
• Mobile/VR performance expertise: profiling (Profiler, Frame Debugger, GPU tools), data management, memory/CPU/GPU tradeoffs.
• Strong debugging, problem-solving, and product sense; you sweat details and ship.
• Shipped title(s) reaching a meaningful audience (mobile or social preferred).

Bonus Points

• Performance-oriented patterns and multiplayer-friendly animation sync.
• AI-assisted/procedural animation (motion matching, pose estimation, predictive blending).
• Physics-informed animation (ragdoll stabilization, locomotion controllers).
• Passion for social gaming and pushing expression in VR + mobile.

Pay and Benefits

Salary ranges may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate's experience, qualifications, and location. Additional benefits for this role include: equity; and medical, dental, and vision benefits; and 401k retirement plan with matching.