Lead Character Tools Engineer

Why Sony Interactive Entertainment?

Sony Interactive Entertainment isn’t just the Best Place to Play - it’s also the Best Place to Work. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the Play Station brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, we’re part of a proud legacy of innovation and excellence. SIE is a dynamic technology company, delivering cutting‑edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people and an entertainment leader, home to some of the most beloved and recognizable intellectual properties (IP) in the world.

Our role at SIE is to create and nurture the experiences under the Play Station brand, a name synonymous with entertainment excellence and creativity.

Play Station isn’t just the Best Place to Play - it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The Play Station family of products and services including Play Station®5, Play Station®4, Play Station®VR, Play Station®Plus, acclaimed Play Station software titles from Play Station Studios, and more.

Play Station also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The Play Station brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation.

We are seeking a Lead Character Tools Engineer to join the Play Station Central Technology team focusing on Character technology from creation, rigging, and animation. Developing and distributing tools and optimizing for making the best characters in games more efficiently and integrating emergent technology into the future of game making.

Candidate expected to prototype, create, and collaborate to deploy and maintain technical tools and practices from experience on traditional game development and run‑time workflows with internal teams and seek new opportunities for bringing increased usage of AI and ML to make those processes more efficient.

This internal team of artists, engineers, and technical artists partner with engineering teams, studio stakeholders, research engineers, and other Central Technology groups to provide cohesion and standardization across PSS activities.

This position requires a demonstratable understanding of game development pipelines, extensive experience with Autodesk Maya software, and strong programming skills. Familiarity with leveraging agentic workflows to accelerate code creation and testing.

• Collaborate with internal team members and studio stakeholders to prototype and harden create tools considering contemporary development workflows, data management, art creation, animation, and game engine integration
• Setting up and maintaining project specific environments and automation opportunities
• Learning and supporting varying client working environments, assets, and tools
• Writing, maintaining, and customizing internal tools and workflows
• Building and maintaining technical documentation
• Willingness to attend and participate in Play Station internal demonstrations and conferences, travel required
• Ability to work in a collaborative team environment as well as self-driven experimentation and research

• Experience as technical artist or engineer to develop and deploy tools to support character creation, rigging, simulation, or animation pipelines in a run‑time environment
• 10+ years in a game development studio or previous experience creating artist-facing tools on technical art or engineering team in a production environment
• BS degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Graphic Art, or a related…