Lead Animator — Hybrid (Relocation Support)

Frontier Developments; Cambridge; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 95,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

Hybrid work

Wellbeing initiatives

Job summary

Frontier Developments in Cambridge is seeking an experienced Lead Animator to helm one of our Animation teams on an exciting new project. We pride ourselves on storytelling, technical excellence, and collaborative creativity.

You will own animation progress and quality, lead a large team, define priorities, and collaborate with Production, external partners, and tooling teams. The role offers relocation support and a hybrid work model.

Qualifications

• Significant animation experience in games, including leading large teams.
• Strong character/creature animation craft and pipelines.
• Proven experience planning team delivery, tracking progress, and balancing capacity.
• Effective people leadership with delegation, coaching and performance management.

Responsibilities

• Own animation progress, delivery, and quality on the assigned project.
• Lead and organise a large animation team, delegating meaningful ownership and oversight.
• Set a clear animation vision, quality bar and delivery plan with priorities.
• Work closely with Production on scope, estimates, schedules, capacity, milestones and risks.
• Coordinate with Project Direction to align Animation with project goals.
• Identify and communicate risks, assumptions and mitigations to senior management.
• Manage team performance and delivery expectations with direct feedback.
• Guide animation practice, engine implementation and creative standards.
• Partner with Technical Animation, Animation Code and Rigging to improve tools and workflows.
• Manage animation outsource relationships and briefs.
• Support recruitment, onboarding, and capability planning.
• Document workflows and reinforce best practices.

Skills

Animation leadership

Character animation

Creature animation

Team management

Animation pipelines

Stakeholder alignment

Unreal/Unity

Python tools

Tools

Unreal Engine

Unity

Blend trees

State machines

Retargeting systems

Job description

Frontier Developments in Cambridge is seeking an experienced Lead Animator to helm one of our Animation teams on an exciting new project. We pride ourselves on storytelling, technical excellence, and collaborative creativity.

You will own animation progress and quality, lead a large team, define priorities, and collaborate with Production, external partners, and tooling teams. The role offers relocation support and a hybrid work model.