Senior Rigger

Location: Full Remote (EU/Italy preferred)

Core collaboration hours: 10:00–16:00 CET/CEST (Italian time)

Position Type: Freelance

Project: You’ll help drive delivery on Bradley the Badger, our upcoming action‑adventure title.

About the Studio

We’re an independent game studio building Bradley the Badger, a systems‑driven action‑adventure game. Our cross‑disciplinary team (design, art, animation, programming, audio) works in tight, iterative loops, combining rapid prototyping with milestone‑driven planning. We value ownership, clarity, and respectful candor: raise risks early, propose solutions, learn fast, and celebrate wins together.

Job Description

As an experienced Senior Rigger, you will be responsible for building robust, flexible, and production-ready rigging systems that bring our characters and creatures to life in Bradley the Badger. You will play a key role in enabling expressive, high-quality animation, ensuring that rigs are performant, animator-friendly, and aligned with the artistic vision of the project.

You will collaborate closely with the Animation Technical Director, as well as animators, 3D character artists, technical artists, and programmers, to develop efficient rigging workflows and solve complex deformation and pipeline challenges. Your work will directly support high-quality character performances while maintaining real-time constraints and stability within Unreal Engine.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-quality character and creature rigs for real-time use in Unreal Engine.
• Develop modular, scalable rigging systems that support a wide range of characters, from stylized heroes to creatures and enemies.
• Collaborate closely with the Animation Technical Director and animation team to ensure rigs meet performance and usability needs.
• Create deformation systems (skin weighting, corrective shapes, blendshapes) that support expressive and appealing animation.
• Work with character artists to ensure clean topology and proper geometry setup for optimal deformation.
• Develop and maintain rigging tools, scripts, and automation workflows to improve pipeline efficiency.
• Troubleshoot and resolve rigging and deformation issues throughout production.
• Optimize rigs for performance in real-time environments while maintaining high visual and animation quality.
• Support integration and testing of rigs in Unreal Engine, including Control Rig where applicable.
• Document rigging systems, workflows, and best practices for team-wide use.
• Collaborate with production to estimate tasks, identify risks, and deliver on schedule.

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Senior Rigger in the gaming industry, ideally on stylized or action-adventure titles.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating high-quality rigging work, including characters and creatures with expressive deformation.
• Expert proficiency in rigging tools such as Maya, including scripting (Python and/or MEL).
• Deep understanding of anatomy, deformation principles, and skin weighting techniques.
• Experience building animator-friendly rigs with clean control systems and intuitive workflows.
• Familiarity with Unreal Engine rigging/animation workflows (e.g., Control Rig) is highly desirable.
• Experience developing tools and automating rigging pipelines.
• Familiarity with Maya Bifrost is desirable
• Solid understanding of real-time constraints and performance optimization.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to debug complex technical issues.
• Ability to work independently and proactively in a fully remote environment.
• Fluency in English is required; proficiency in Italian is preferred.

What we offer

• A fully remote work environment that promotes flexibility and work-life balance.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development within the company.
• A collaborative and inclusive team culture that values creativity and innovation.

Job Type: Contract

Work Location: Remote