Lead Character Artist in Québec

NBCUniversal is seeking a Lead Character Artist to own and drive the visual quality of facial characters for an ambitious interactive entertainment experience. This role is responsible for ensuring that character assets meet high standards of quality, consistency, and technical excellence while supporting the project's artistic vision. The Lead Character Artist will work closely with the Associate Art Director – Characters and cross-disciplinary teams to ensure seamless integration across animation, rigging, and gameplay systems. This role also includes leading and mentoring artists, contributing to pipeline development, and helping scale character production to meet project needs.

Responsibilities

• Translate art direction into high-quality character assets that support the project's visual and narrative goals.
• Lead and mentor a team of character artists while fostering collaboration, growth, and artistic excellence.
• Review and validate character assets to ensure they meet artistic, technical, and production standards.
• Create and oversee the development of high-quality character content, including anatomy, materials, clothing, accessories, grooming, and overall presentation.
• Partner closely with Animation, Design, Tech Art, Engineering, and Production teams to ensure successful implementation of character assets.
• Ensure character content integrates efficiently into gameplay and production pipelines.
• Establish and promote best practices for character creation within a modern real-time production environment.
• Identify opportunities to improve workflows, tools, and pipelines to support production scalability and efficiency.
• Collaborate with external partners and outsourcing teams when required to maintain quality and consistency.
• Support the definition and evolution of character art standards, documentation, and workflows across the project.
• Apply best practices within Unreal Engine 5, Metahuman pipelines and others.
• Identify and improve workflows to support scalability and production efficiency.

Basic Qualifications

• Minimum 7 years of experience in AAA game development with a focus on character art.
• Proven experience leading, mentoring, or managing artists within a production environment.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating high-quality character art for real-time applications.
• Excellent understanding of anatomy, form, proportion, materials, and character design principles.
• Experience creating character content for modern game engines and real-time environments.
• Strong understanding of character production pipelines and asset creation workflows.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to balance artistic quality with technical and production constraints.

Desired Characteristics

• Experience with modular character systems, customization systems or scalable character pipelines.
• Knowledge of facial rigging, blendshapes, simulation or performance capture workflows or any related character development workflows.
• Experience shipping at least one AAA title in a senior or as a lead character art role.
• Experience collaborating with outsourcing partners or distributed teams.
• Passion for achieving high levels of realism and character expressiveness.
• Experience with Unreal engine.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a proactive approach to pipeline and process improvements.

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with an NBCUniversal employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. NBCUniversal's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law. If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to AccessibilitySupport@nbcuni.com.