Character Rigging Lead

Tolan is an Embodied Companion: a cute, friendly AI alien that you talk with naturally, like a friend. They have unique preferences and personalities, and over time they form memories about you, your friendship, and your life. Tolan is built by an experienced team with a lot of history together. We previously founded Even, acquired for $300m in 2022. Our engineering team comes from places like Apple, Square, and character.ai.

Our design and creative team has won Apple Design Awards and designed products like Facebook and Dropbox. Our investors include the designers and founders behind products like Instagram, Retro, Behance, Vimeo and Notion. We love to work hard, with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. We work together in-person in downtown SF.

We’re looking for a hands‑on Character Rigging Lead to own the character rig pipeline for the Tolan world. This role is about building rigs that ship: expressive, animator‑friendly, consistent, and optimized for real‑time on mobile devices. You’ll sit at the center of character production, partnering closely with animators and creative, iterating quickly, and building a modular rigging system that scales as our cast grows.

• Own character rigging pipeline from concept to ship in Maya + Unity
• Rig hero characters with high appeal, stylized motion, and quality deformation while staying performant.
• Create animator‑first rigs that are easy to understand, fast to pose, and hard to break.
• Design a modular rigging approach for scaling across characters (shared templates, reusable components, consistent naming/controls), while allowing per‑character personality.
• Continuously iterate in production: diagnose problems quickly, improve rigs without pipeline churn, and keep the team unblocked.

• Have shipped high‑quality real‑time characters and enjoy wearing both artistic and engineering hats
• Excel at making stylized characters inside a tight performance budget.
• Love collaborating and can turn feedback into better, more expressive characters.
• Prefer being hands‑on and owning a big surface area in a small team

• Are naturally gifted at animation and understand what makes a rig feel good to animate
• Have strong modeling skills and can touch up meshes without issue
• Have experience with dynamic/secondary motion systems for hair/clothing in real‑time.
• Have experience building validation tooling or rigging automation
• Are the kind of rigging artist that can make a character feel expressive, embodied, and loveable