Technical Art Director - Los Angeles

About the role

Pickford is building the next generation of storytelling. We're building expressive interactive narratives, while preserving storytelling's historical foundation as a tight loop between audience and creator. Our focus story quality and audience engagement means we get to work with truly exceptional creators. Our AI expertise has attracted world-class researchers. Together we're defining a new category of media. All of this comes together in a UGC platform where creators can build, share, and collaborate on living narrative worlds which can only be powered by AI. Position Overview: We're looking for a senior Technical Art Director to own the bridge between product, engineering, ML, design, and art. This role is for someone who can translate creative vision into a practical, scalable art pipeline. You'll help define how our characters, animations, environments, and visual systems should look and function, while making sure the assets we receive from external artists are beautiful, performant, production-ready, and technically compatible with our systems. A major focus of this role will be animation: character rigs, animation quality, blending, retargeting, runtime performance, and ensuring our characters feel alive, attractive, expressive, and emotionally engaging. You should be equally comfortable giving creative feedback, reviewing contractor work, debugging a pipeline problem in Unreal, and sitting with engineers to design better tools for artists. We're a small team building something new, so this is not a purely managerial role. We need someone senior enough to set standards and direction, but hands-on enough to jump in when the pipeline breaks or the work needs to get shipped. Key Responsibilities: 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. Skills and Qualifications: 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. Preferred Qualifications: 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. What We Offer: 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 b