Animator job at Valve Corporation. Washington DC.

At Valve we look beyond hiring for a set position, but instead, we seek exceptional people with broad skill sets who also exhibit deep expertise in their chosen craft. The animators at Valve are a world‑class group of artists working with writers, software engineers, and designers who are continually creating and releasing compelling entertainment experiences to players around the world.

Animators determine work priorities in collaboration with their peers, contributing creative solutions throughout production in a variety of ways. From conceptualizing ideas to producing an extensive range of animated content including dynamic interactive performances and large‑scale cinematic moments, whose work is crucial in helping shape ideas. Within each team, they are part of prototyping gameplay experiences with designers and programmers for a diverse array of characters, creatures, and in‑game encounters. They also work closely with software engineers to improve our proprietary tools, maximize efficiency of our workflow, and to ensure the animation that we create is exceptional.

At Valve our animators are highly experienced and can demonstrate a number of skills, most importantly:

They collaborate with other employees and solve hard problems that make products better.

Each of them has examples – that they can share – showing that they have done something particularly exciting that makes their work special.

What work or experiences can YOU share that are novel and inspiring?

• Product‑level thinking that informs intentional, meaningful decisions from concept to completion.
• An outstanding ability to portray believable physical movement, strong acting, storytelling and performance of 3D computer‑generated characters.
• A detailed understanding of Maya; experience working with motion capture and building animation state machines.
• Knowledge of rigging, scripting, modeling, texturing, lighting, and video editing.
• Prior professional experiences shipping world‑class products in the software, television or film industry.

Interested? Send us your reel, resume, and examples of interesting problems you’ve solved. Sorry, we do not accept student reels.