JALI Inc., a leading software developer of synchronized speech and facial animation tools is seeking an animator or technical artist with rigging, programming skills and game pipeline experience (or combination thereof, and preference given to those with experience with UE4/5) to join our growing team and contribute meaningfully to the development of cool, powerful, and useful tools for the future of expressive digital storytelling. The successful candidate will join a critically acclaimed and Academy Award winning engineering and animation team, and will get to work on some of the most exciting and well known AAA game IP’s being released in 2022 / 2023 / 2024.

RESPONSIBILITIES
● Collaborate with the development team on all animation related technology, mainly focused on rigging, animation and exporters, editors, and pipelines in UNREAL ENGINE 5
● Support the design, development, and optimization features of the Unreal plugin for JALI using a combination of C++, Python, Blueprints
● Work closely with animation and engineering leads in the product development process, taking ideas from design, through prototyping and into production
● Collaborate with the sales team to assemble and organize user requirements, feedback and technical challenges faced by our customers
● Maintain and fix bugs in the JALI toolchain
● Test, debug, profile, analyze and optimize your code

QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS
● A degree in Computer Science, digital college or institute and / or professional experience developing pipelines and creating tools
● Strong Programming skills in Python, C++ and Unreal Engine Blueprints
● Proficiency in animation (facial) and rigging (using skeletal bones or blend shapes) in Maya specifically and other DCC platforms
● In depth and detailed understanding of animation and deformation in run-time and in editor
● Knowledge of 3D mathematics (e.g. linear algebra, trigonometry and matrices)
● Knowledge of current facial capture approaches, FACS poses, facial blend shape rigs, feature detection, etc.
● Experience using source control software (i.e. Perforce, Git)

TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL…
● Have the ability to work as part of a team
● Be a self-starter with a can-do attitude
● Possess a continuous learning mindset
● Be cooperative, kind and patient
● Communicate effectively, verbally, in writing and visually, especially when conveying complex technical information
● Demonstrate advanced analytical and problem-solving skills
● Stay current with latest technologies/research ongoing in the field to help keep our dynamic art visuals at the cutting-edge regarding motion and deformation
● Be passionate about games development, animation and creative technologies

JOB DETAILS
Reports to: CTO
Permanent, Full-time Contract options are negotiable, ideally 1 year min

COMPENSATION
Full time
Negotiated Salary, Full Benefits, Eligible Performance and Company Growth Bonuses.
Paid vacation, PTO and sick days

JALI offers flexible work formats with options to work in the office, remote or on a hybrid model. JALI is committed to inclusion and diversity. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply.

LOCATION
Our transit-friendly studio space is located inToronto’s eclectic Kensington Market, at 156 Augusta Ave. 2nd Floor, Toronto ON. Amenities include spacious workstations, unlimited meeting room access, kitchen and common areas.

JALI Inc., a leading software developer of synchronized speech and facial animation tools, is seeking an experienced UI Engineer to join our rapidly growing team and contribute meaningfully to the architecture and user interface of JALI’s existing and developing suite of expert tools and API’s that are driving the future of expressive digital storytelling. This person values the importance of building team buy-in, has developed deep listening skills through their experience and will be able to successfully synthesize customer requirements into new features and improvements to drive product forward to achieve company goals. A dynamic collaborator, the successful candidate will always be driving, maximizing and removing barriers to easy adoption in our current markets to our current user set, exploring ways to expand our technology into other markets and determining how to productize it for other uses.

The successful candidate will join a critically acclaimed and Academy Award winning engineering and animation team, and will get to work on some of the most exciting and well known AAA game IP’s being released in 2023 / 2024.

YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO
● Collaborate with the JALI development team to continually implement best-in-class frameworks for robust software development and procedures, building scalable and responsive UI components in CSS and Vue
● Develop, maintain, optimize and provide UI support for the JALI plugins and C++ libraries
● Provide support to our Sales team and JALI clients as needed
● Great understanding of CSS, Vue (3), TypeScript and design principles
● Attention to detail for pixel perfection and UX
● Demonstrable experience building UI component systems
● Collaborate with development build scalable, responsive UI components in CSS and Vue

  QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS
● A degree in Computer Science, digital college or institute and / or professional experience developing pipelines and creating tools
● Strong sense of design principles, experience and system architecture, API integration
● Strong Programming skills in Python, C++ and Unreal Engine Blueprints
● Great understanding of CSS, Vue (3), TypeScript
● Proficiency in Maya specifically and other DCC platforms
● Experience using source control software (i.e. Perforce, Git)

  TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL…
  ● Be solution and value oriented
● Be passionate about games development, UX and creative technologies
● Be able to effectively gather and synthesize customer and end user requirements
● Demonstrate deep listening skills when communicating with both team and customers
● Communicate effectively and clearly in writing, visually and orally, especially when conveying complex technical information
● Be cooperative and kind
● Demonstrate advanced analytical and problem-solving skills, and creative and flexible thinking
● Stay up to date with current technology and UI/UX trends

JOB DETAILS
Reports to: CTO
Permanent, Full-time Contract options are negotiable, ideally 1 year min

  COMPENSATION
Full time
Negotiated Salary, Full Benefits, and any eligible performance and Company Growth Bonuses.
Paid vacation, PTO and sick days

  JALI offers flexible work formats with options to work in the office, remote or on a hybrid model.
JALI is committed to inclusion and diversity. We encourage all qualified applicants to apply.

  LOCATION
Our transit-friendly studio is located in Toronto’s eclectic Kensington Market, at 156 Augusta Ave. 2nd Floor, Toronto ON.  Amenities include spacious workstations, unlimited meeting room access, kitchen and common areas. Unfortunately the studio is not an accessible space at this time.

Please apply with resume/CVApply

At JALI we view 3D characters, whether they are hero characters, NPC, or in-car virtual assistants, as digital actors. And at their most essential, whether they are photorealistic models rendered in 4K resolution, or they are cube - headed avatars on a Minecraft server or Roblox, the way in which they are all the same, is that they all have a job to do. And that job is to give a performance.

To power those performances, we develop artistic tools to drive the expressive performance of 3D digital characters, enabling story and character development, direction and animation capable of massive scale up with a fraction of typical resources.

Since the fall of 2020, when we launched our first product offering in conjunction with the much anticipated AAA game release, Cyberpunk2077 with development partners CD Projekt Red, we have been powering more expansive and more dynamic character driven stories, by accelerating production pipelines and empowering animators with user friendly automated animation workflows.

The founders of JALI are leaders in the area of speech animation whose recent contributions to the field include resurrecting the long dormant area of procedural speech (SIGGRAPH 2016) and also for new work in deep learning based real-time speech (SIGGRAPH 2018). JALI CTO Pif Edwards is continually breaking new ground with his graduate research that has provided a disruptive speech-centric workflow for character animation in the form of JALI’s core software solution. 

The facial animation tools in the current industry standard for modeling and animation since 1998 Autodesk Maya (technical Oscar in 2003), were singularly designed and developed by JALI co-founders Karan Singh and Chris Landreth. Landreth’s award winning animated films Bingo (Genie 1998), Ryan (Oscar 2005), Spine (Genie nomination 2009), are celebrated for their uniquely expressive character faces. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and member of the SIGGRAPH Academy, Eugene Fiume, likewise a pioneer in computer graphics, served as Director of Research at Alias|wavefront (now Autodesk). He is well known for helping to bring physical modeling of natural phenomena into production graphics systems.