JOB DESCRIPTION
Animator/Technical Artist

JALI Inc., a leading software developer of synchronized speech and facial animation tools is seeking an animator or technical artist with rigging, programming skills and game pipeline experience (or combination thereof) to join our growing team and contribute meaningfully to the development of cool, powerful, and useful tools for the future of expressive digital storytelling. The ideal candidate will be familiar with rigging across Maya, UE5 and Unity. The successful candidate will be joining a critically acclaimed and Academy
Award winning engineering and animation team working on some of the most exciting and well known
AAA game IP’s being released in 2023/2024/2025.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

● Collaborate with the development team on all animation related technology, mainly focused on rigging, animation and exporters, editors, and pipelines in UNREAL ENGINE 5

● Support the design, development, and optimization features of the Unreal plugin for JALI using a combination of C++, Python, Blueprints

● Work closely with animation and engineering leads in the product development process, taking ideas from design, through prototyping and into production

● Collaborate with the sales team to assemble and organize user requirements, feedback and technical challenges faced by our customers

● Maintain and fix bugs in the JALI toolchain
● Test, debug, profile, analyze and optimize your code

QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS

● A degree in Computer Science, digital college or institute and / or professional experience developing pipelines and creating tools.

● Possess a 3D Artist's knowledge of creating and animating characters, particularly character faces.

● Have knowledge/insight of fundamental facial-rigging concepts (e.g. Blendshapes, Skinclusters and other deformers in a rigging setup) and be familiar with implementing these concepts across those 3 platforms (e.g. UE5's Blueprints/Control Rig, Maya's Rigging tools and Node Editor, etc.)

● Have knowledge of C++ (UE5) and C# (Unity), but also scripting languages (particularly Maya's
MEL, and Python), to aid in rig setup and porting.

● Knowledge of file formats for porting between platforms (particularly FBX but likely USD etc.).
● In depth and detailed understanding of animation and deformation in run-time and in editor
● Knowledge of 3D mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, trigonometry and matrices)
● Knowledge of current facial capture approaches, FACS poses, facial blend shape rigs, feature detection, etc.
● Experience using source control software (i.e. Perforce, Git)

TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL…

● Be committed to mastering the above skills over time and your own professional growth
● Have the ability to oscillate between being a self-starter who is able to work independently and working collaboratively with your team
● Communicate effectively, verbally, in writing and visually, especially when conveying complex technical information
● Demonstrate advanced analytical and problem-solving skills
● Stay current with latest technologies/research ongoing in the field to help keep our dynamic art visuals at the cutting-edge regarding motion and deformation
● Be passionate about games development, animation and creative technologies

JALI Inc.
Studio Headquarters: 156 Studio Projects, 156 Augusta Ave, 2nd Fl. Toronto ON M5T 2L5

Contact: teams@jaliresearch.com www.jaliresearch.com

JOB DESCRIPTION
Animator/Technical Artist

JOB DETAILS
Reports to: CTO
Permanent, Full-time Contract options are negotiable, ideally 1 year min

COMPENSATION
Full time
Negotiated Salary, Benefits, Eligible Performance and Company Growth Bonuses.
Paid vacation, PTO and sick days

JALI offers flexible work formats with options to work in the office, remote or on a hybrid model.
JALI is committed to inclusion and diversity. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply.

LOCATION
Our transit-friendly studio space is located in Toronto’s eclectic Kensington Market, at 156 Augusta Ave.
2nd Floor, Toronto ON. Amenities include spacious workstations, unlimited meeting room access, kitchen and common areas. The space is not wheelchair accessible.

OUR TEAM
The founders of JALI are leaders in the area of speech animation whose recent contributions to the field include resurrecting the long dormant area of procedural speech (SIGGRAPH 2016) and also for new work in deep learning based real-time speech (SIGGRAPH 2018). JALI CTO Pif Edwards is continually breaking new ground with his graduate research that has provided a disruptive speech-centric workflow for character animation in the form of JALI’s core software solution. The facial animation tools in the current industry standard for modeling and animation since 1998 Autodesk Maya (technical Oscar in
2003), were singularly designed and developed by JALI co-founders Karan Singh and Chris Landreth.
Landreth’s award winning animated films Bingo (Genie 1998), Ryan (Oscar 2005), Spine (Genie nomination 2009), are celebrated for their uniquely expressive character faces. A Fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada, and member of the SIGGRAPH Academy, Eugene Fiume, likewise a pioneer in computer graphics, served as Director of Research at Alias|wavefront (now Autodesk). He is well known for helping to bring physical modeling of natural phenomena into production graphics systems.

JALI Powered.
At JALI we view 3D characters, whether they are hero characters, NPC, or in-car virtual assistants, as digital actors. And at their most essential, whether they are photorealistic models rendered in 4K resolution, or they are cube - headed avatars on a Minecraft server or Roblox, the way in which they are all the same, is that they all have a job to do. And that job is to give a performance.

To power those performances, we develop artistic tools to drive the expressive performance of 3D digital characters, enabling story and character development, direction and animation capable of massive scale up with a fraction of typical resources.

Since the fall of 2020, when we launched our first product offering in conjunction with the much anticipated AAA game release, Cyberpunk2077 with development partners CD Projekt Red, we have been powering more expansive and more dynamic character driven stories, by accelerating production pipelines and empowering animators with user friendly automated animation workflows.

JALI Inc.
Studio Headquarters: 156 Studio Projects, 156 Augusta Ave, 2nd Fl. Toronto ON M5T 2L5

Contact: teams@jaliresearch.com www.jaliresearch.com

Job Type: Full-time

Salary: $50,000.00-$90,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental care
• Extended health care
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision care

Flexible Language Requirement:

• French not required

Schedule:

• Monday to Friday

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Toronto, ON

Application deadline: 2023-04-03

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