Senior Technical Animator / Character TD

WHO ARE WE? Antioch is the simulation platform for robotics and autonomy. We enable teams to design, train, and test their physical systems in high-fidelity cloud simulation, accelerated by 3D-native agents. With Antioch, teams create precision-calibrated digital twins, generate testing environments, and run massively parallel simulation scenarios. By moving development out of the field and into software, Antioch drastically reduces dependence on expensive, slow, and incomplete real-world testing. We work with leading robotics, autonomy, and perception teams to make the deployment of physical autonomous systems safer, faster, and more cost-effective. WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR? We are hiring Senior Technical Animators / Character TDs to develop our sim-ready character pipeline (USD / Omniverse / Isaac Sim / Metahumans) to push the frontier of realism in our simulations. You'll work across character creation (with a focus on Metahumans integration), character controllers, hand-tuned and procedural character animation, and prop physics to solve real-world problems. This is an early, high-ownership builder role. Your work at Antioch will be used by some of the world’s foremost Physical AI teams—companies transforming manufacturing, logistics, construction, safety, and more. If you like the 0 → 1 grind and want your work to directly determine whether autonomous systems succeed in the real world, you’ll fit right in. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Build the Python pipeline tooling for creating and exporting Metahumans from Unreal Engine to Isaac Sim, conforming to USD standards. - Design and implement advanced character controllers with motion matching and procedural character animation, with a primary focus on humanoid animation but expanding to quadraped animals as well. - Integrate frontier models for prompt-based animation, supporting the needs for massively parallel synthetic data generation. - Create and refine custom animation clips where necessary, sourcing core motions from third party libraries, procedurally generated clips, or video-to-motion workflows. - Rig and refine clothing and accessory/prop setups, configuring dynamic effects where physics simulation is necessary. - Develop modular character configuration and waypoint animation capabilities within the simulation platform. This is a development-heavy and pioneering role, shaping our entire character pipeline. You’ll be a key representative of Antioch in customer conversations, site visits, and more, playing a core role in how we build. You'll work alongside Antioch’s founders, technical artists producing simulation assets and pipeline tools, and software engineers building cloud and orchestration infrastructure. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR (BASELINE REQUIREMENTS) You don't need every box checked. We're looking for strength in most of these: - Expert knowledge of Unreal Engine, motion matching, and animation blueprints, with the ability to translate learnings to a new engine. - Strong portfolio demonstrating custom Python tooling for character creation and animation in real-time game engines, with a preference for Unreal Engine Metahumans. - Experience with procedural character animation, prop interaction, and generative pipelines. - Deep knowledge of rigging and performant physics configuration for character clothing, hair, and accessories. - Strong character animation experience, especially utilizing Sequencer and Control Rigs within Unreal Engine. - Experience and comfort with agentic-assisted development workflows. - A track record of shipping production-ready capabilities, not just prototypes. NICE-TO-HAVES - Direct experience with NVIDIA Omniverse and/or Isaac Sim. - Deep knowledge of USD pipelines. - Experience with NVIDIA's Newton or Warp libraries. - Prior work on synthetic data generation, simulation, robotics, or autonomy. - Familiarity with sensor-ready materials across camera + radar + lidar + infrared simulation domains. YOU MAY BE A GREAT FIT IF… - You’re a high-agency builder: you don’t wait to be told what to do, you go figure it out - You give a shit — you care deeply about what you ship and reflexively take accountability - You like the 0 → 1 environment and chose it on purpose - You balance craft and pragmatism: you push for excellence, but ship what's needed now - You're comfortable with uncertainty and love diving across the stack to solve a problem - You're customer-obsessed and want the thing to work for real people WHY ANTIOCH - Real problems, real stakes. Our customers build physical autonomous systems that have to behave correctly in the real world, and our work directly affects whether they get there. - High ownership. You'll own systems end-to-end rather than narrow tasks, with fast iteration and direct customer feedback. - Team caliber. Work with a founding team who have previously built and sold companies, and worked at leading companies like Google Deepmind, Tesla Autopilot, Meta Reality Labs, and more. - Build the company, not just the product. Early team members help define engineering culture, product direction, and how we win. OUR HIRING PROCESS - Application review - Introduction call - Project deep-dive - Practical exercise (paid): deliver a small USDZ character asset set with associated Python scripts, validated in an Omniverse-compatible workflow - Final convo with the team