Character & Facial Animation Consultant | $60–90/hr | Los Angeles, CA or New York, NY (Hybrid)
Join a leading AI lab's GenAI team as a senior Character and Facial Animation Consultant, where your deep expertise in performance craft will directly shape the future of AI-driven performance transfer technology. This is a part-time, W-2 position employed through Cincinnatus LLC, embedded within a world-class AI research team.
About the Role
A leading AI lab is developing a performance transfer model designed to faithfully carry an actor's original performance — preserving timing, emotion, and subtle physical nuance — into new AI-generated outputs. To ensure evaluations reflect true craft quality, the team is seeking senior character animators to define evaluation standards, curate benchmarks, and guide the human reviewer pool.
Key Responsibilities
- Establish evaluation standards: Define clear, expert-level criteria for assessing emotional resonance and physical fidelity in captured performances, and identify gaps in current evaluation approaches.
- Curate benchmarks: Select strong performance examples — ranging from straightforward to genuinely challenging — to create meaningful model tests.
- Shape the evaluation pool: Help define the ideal expertise profile, reviewer mix, and scoring rubrics for large-scale human evaluation.
- Collaborate with subject-matter experts: Work alongside fellow specialists to maintain consistency and accuracy across evaluations.
Core Qualifications
- 4+ years of hands-on character animation experience, with human or character performance as your primary craft.
- Verifiable credits on 2 or more feature films, animated features, or AAA game cinematics at recognized studios.
- Direct experience with facial animation and/or performance capture — including facial keyframe work, motion-capture solving, cleanup, motion editing, or facial rig design.
- A meticulous eye for micro-expressions, emotional beats, and the subtleties that define authentic human performance.
- Familiarity with AI tools and workflows, including the ability to generate visual samples for testing and comparison.
- Strong ability to translate complex visual observations into precise, data-ready language for captions and evaluation templates.
- Ability to attend on-site working sessions in Playa Vista (Los Angeles), CA or New York, NY once or twice per month.
- (Optional) Access to a 4K-resolution monitor for pixel-level review work.
Who This Role Is Not For
This position is specifically for animators whose primary craft is character performance. It is not suited for directors of photography, lighting or camera specialists, colorists, compositors, editors, or generalist 3D artists. Layout, previsualization, environment, and effects experience alone will not qualify.
Employment Details
This is a structured, part-time W-2 position through Cincinnatus LLC, an enterprise staffing company that partners with leading technology firms. Cincinnatus serves as the employer of record, providing payroll, benefits, and compliance support while placing employees directly within client teams.
Cincinnatus LLC is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer committed to an inclusive and accessible hiring process.
