Lead Character Artist

At Kabam, we’re constantly raising the bar of excellence in free-to-play gaming. We hire for passion and diversity so that we can triumph in our collective skill. Our teams are made up of a fusion of personalities and interests bound together by a collaborative nature, fun-loving culture, and a drive to do what it takes to make great games. And this is where you come in…

The Lead Character Artist is responsible for overseeing the character design and creation process from concept to animation and final integration. This role ensures that our games feature compelling and visually stunning characters, animation and VFX. They will lead a team of artists both internally and externally and work closely with various departments to bring our characters to life. They understand the Character creation process along with the technical and artistic constraints.

They partner with designers and engineers to realize characters that are meaningful to players and executed at high quality in the game.

This role is a full-time, on-site position based 5 days a week at our Downtown Vancouver studio.

In this role, you can expect to:

• Supervise the entire pipeline, from concept through modeling, materials, textures, props, animation, VFX, and integration.
• Ensure characters support narrative, artistic style, and emotional tone.
• Collaborate with Design, Creative, Engineering, and other disciplines.
• Maintain consistent quality across all character assets.
• Seek efficiency in cost, resources, and workflow.

• Define quality benchmarks for 2D elements (models, textures, animations, VFX).
• Guide team prototypes and visual targets to establish identity.
• Translate feedback from leadership and stakeholders.
• Uphold consistency and polish across the roster.

• Partner with technical teams to improve pipelines, tools, and workflows.
• Ensure characters are delivered, integrated, and meet quality bars.
• Champion best practices (texture sheet size, poly count, memory budgets).
• Seek automation and streamlining to balance quality with efficiency.

• Advocate for hiring key positions and source key talent.
• Manage a team of animators, 2D artists, VFX artists and other character-related positions.
• Manage and contract external artists as needed to supplement internal capacity and capability.
• Foster a collaborative, high-performing team aligned with the studio and product vision.

To be successful in this role, your background includes:

• Post-Secondary degree or certification in related field.
• 5+ years experience in a leadership role in Character art/animation in the gaming industry. Experience working with IP partners preferred.
• Strong proficiency in 2D illustration, and vector-based animated/stylized character design.
• Strong knowledge of industry-standard software such as Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Animate, and Spine.
• Strong knowledge of proportion, anatomy and animation principles as applied to 2D animation.
• Solid understanding of Character rigging, weighting, and animation.
• Solid understanding of real-time limitations for 2D assets.
• Familiarity with game engines, such as Unity or Unreal Engine. Understanding of Unity shaders, VFX/animation nice to have but not required.
• Exceptional leadership and team management abilities.
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills.
• Passion for gaming and a deep appreciation for the importance of character design in storytelling. Character concept design, storyboarding, and/or layout design is beneficial but not required.

Our success is due to the hard work of our people. We share our success with our people through flexible benefits and reward programs, sweet swag, snacks, and more. Here’s a look at some of the support we provide our people:

• Extended Health Coverage: effective day one, no waiting period! Our benefits cover health, dental, life, disability, and extended paramedical services such as vision care, mental health practitioners, massage, physiotherapy, acupuncture, and much more.
• DEIB Benefits: DEIB is important to us and to our people - that’s why our…