CD PROJEKT RED is on the lookout for a skilled and passionate Cinematic Open World Animator to join our team for a one year fixed-term contract as we expand the boundaries of immersive storytelling through gameplay. This is a unique opportunity to help shape how the living, breathing world of our games feels, moves, and connects with the player, beyond the confines of traditional cutscenes.

As a Cinematic Open World Animator, you’ll be crafting animations that bring dynamic, non-player characters (NPCs), animals, creatures, and environmental interactions to life. Your work will support the creation of world routines, behaviors, ambient scenes, and contextual events, always with narrative intent and gameplay responsiveness in mind. Whether it’s a merchant setting up their stall, an animal or creature with its routine reacting to player presence, or civilians engaging in their daily lives, your animation will help give the world soul and believability.

You’ll work closely with various design teams and cross-disciplinary departments, from Open World and Gameplay design to Technical Animation and Asset Team, in a highly communicative and collaborative environment. Together, we aim to create a world that feels systemic, responsive, and rich with narrative detail.  If you’re driven by systemic storytelling, emergent animation challenges, and creating moments that feel meaningful even outside of dialogue or cinematics, this is the role for you.

Daily Responsibilities 

• Being a game developer first — thinking about how your animations will look, feel, and respond within dynamic gameplay and systemic world scenarios.
• Taking ownership of animation content for a specific area of the game world, and collaborating in a multi-disciplinary team to deliver immersive open world experiences.
• Delivering work that aligns with the overall artistic and narrative direction of the project — even outside traditional cinematics.
• Creating final, high-quality animation assets for world routines, ambient behaviors, creatures, environmental interactions, and narrative-driven systemic events — using both motion capture and keyframe techniques.
• Collaborating on a daily basis with the Cinematic Animation Lead and other departments (e.g. Gameplay, Open World Design, Narrative…) to ensure animations serve gameplay and worldbuilding goals.
• Estimating time required to complete your tasks and delivering on schedule with attention to implementation details.
• Rapidly prototyping and iterating animations to test ideas and bring systemic interactions to life.
• Offering creative and technical solutions to everyday animation challenges, especially those tied to systemic or emergent behaviors.
• Sharing knowledge with the team and supporting less experienced animators through feedback and mentorship.