Machine Learning Engineer, Animation

As a ML Animation Engineer on the Avatar Movement team, you will work on challenging problems at the intersection of machine learning and character animation, to bring 3D avatars to life for millions of users on the Roblox platform. 

Roblox empowers players and developers to unleash their creativity, and our team focuses on the control and animation of both player and AI-controlled avatars. Your work will include developing algorithms and machine learning techniques for data-driven motion synthesis (e.g., motion matching, style transfer), NPC behavior, and AI-powered authoring tools for content creation. 

You Are: 

• Experienced in applying Machine Learning to problems related to 3D motion synthesis, control, and animation content creation.
• Knowledgeable about convolutional and sequential neural architectures (e.g., RNN’s, LSTM’s, seq2seq, Transformers etc) and recent trends in generative models (e.g. diffusion models)
• Proficient in at least one Machine Learning library (TensorFlow, Torch etc)
• Familiar with traditional computer animation and comfortable programming in C++. Experience with Lua is a plus.
• Foundation oriented: you understand the importance of good foundations to enable fast iterations
• Performance-minded: we are building a platform accessible to everyone and especially from mobile devices.
• Self driven: Self-sufficient, self-organized and able to take ownership of a project throughout its full lifecycle
• Team player: Ability to work closely with and inspire the rest of your team while displaying excellent interpersonal and communication skills

You Have: 

• A Masters in a related field with an emphasis on machine learning for computer animation and 5+ years of experience, or equivalent industry/academic experience
• Experience deploying ML models in production environments with the VFX, animation, gaming, robotics, or similar industries 

Nice to Have: 

• Knowledgeable in algorithms related to motion matching, style transfer, motion warping, motion editing, multi-character animation, crowd modeling, X2Anim (e.g., video2anim, NL2anim, sketch2anim) etc.
• Publications in graphics, robotics, or ML conferences (SIGGRAPH, ICRA, IROS, ICML, NeurIPS or similar) 
• Familiarity with on-device machine learning 

You Will: 

• Help defining the ML roadmap for Avatar Movement
• Design advanced AI/ML techniques for motion synthesis, NPC behavior, and animation authoring
• Be responsible for the deployment and maintenance of such technologies.
• Keep up to date with the latest academic and industry breakthroughs, independently research and develop improvements to continuously push our technology forward.