Senior Software Engineer, Animation

Senior Software Engineer, Animation LEGO Digital Play will bring the LEGO brand into digital entertainment in new, innovative, and wholly-owned ways. Our mission is to ensure the LEGO Brand remains as powerfully a part of children’s lives in the coming decades as it has ever been. We aim to reach every kid on the planet, their parents, and adult fans of LEGO—and provide them with meaningful, magical, and playful new experiences. Central Technology is the engineering heart of LEGO Digital Play, a venture within the LEGO ecosystem dedicated to pioneering creative and joyful digital experiences. Our teams build the foundational platforms, tools, and capabilities that power LEGO's digital future. We work at the intersection of play and developer tooling to bring the LEGO brand to a new generation of digital builders. It's a rare opportunity to shape something from the ground up within one of the world's most loved brands. We are at the earliest phases of this new company, offering a unique opportunity to build a new entity for the world's most beloved and trusted brand. Our culture is open, collaborative, intellectually rigorous, and creatively vibrant. This is a newly created role based in London, England; this is an individual contributor role reporting to the Director of Digital Art and Avatars. Key Responsibilities Build and own the animation systems at the heart of LDP's platform, creating foundations that internal and external development teams build their experiences on. Own the integration of animation systems across multiple engines, ensuring consistent behaviour, performance and reliability across engine targets. Deliver best-in-class animation systems against scalable frame budgets across platforms. Partner with tech art to build and maintain reference implementations of animation systems and libraries. Support the animation and rigging pipelines, contributing to tooling and informing design and engineering decisions. Contribute to platform standards for animation assets, metadata, versioning and API design, working with platform and tools engineers to maintain interoperability across the wider system. Raise the technical bar through design and code reviews, and communicate trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical partners across LDP. Required Qualifications Bachelor's or higher degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, STEM field or equivalent practical experience. Significant hands-on experience designing and building real-time animation systems for interactive or entertainment software. Proven experience developing and integrating animation systems in engines such as Unity or Unreal, with awareness of editor and runtime needs and asset specifics. Strong programming skills in a low level language, with a track record deploying in both editor and runtime, and the ability to remain hands-on in implementation, debugging and code review. Experience profiling and optimising real-time systems against performance and memory constraints across platforms. Familiarity with motion and rig-specific optimisations such as animation compression, LOD strategies and other runtime optimisation techniques. Fluency with modern AI tooling across development and the work around it, using it to move faster while retaining the judgement to catch its failures and stand behind the quality of what ships. Strong communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical audiences, including artists, platform engineers and product partners. Comfort operating in early-stage environments where standards and practices are still being defined. Preferred Qualifications Experience with procedural, physics-driven or non-character animation, such as mechanical or environmental motion systems. Background in gameplay engineering, including basic character controller design. Experience with cross-platform asset pipelines or engine-agnostic animation frameworks. Department LEGO Digital Play Locations LEGO Digital Play London Office Remote status Hybrid