Lead Animator

Job Introduction

Lead Animator

Location: Remote UK

Contract: Permanent

Hours: 37.5 hours per week 

Line Manager: Head of Design

We're here to help those who teach. It's what brings us to work every day. At Twinkl, we’ve been providing educators across the world with high quality, trusted teaching and learning resources for over a decade now. They’re all written and checked by our wonderful team of experienced educators, and there are hundreds of thousands of resources to download, with new ones added daily.

We’re looking for an experienced Animation Team Lead to evolve our animation team, helping elevate the quality of work produced on a daily basis, while streamlining the team’s processes based on industry best practices. You will be responsible for managing a team of 7 animators and asset creators with different skill sets, while occasionally contributing to projects yourself.

How you’ll spend your day:

• Manage and lead a team: The animation team will rely on you to help guide and mentor them, while introducing industry best practices that promote time efficiency and high quality standards. With you as their leader, the team should be represented and motivated to deliver their best work through a strong culture that empowers them to take pride in their work.

• Plan and deliver animations: You’ll be responsible for scheduling, coordinating, and managing animations from kick-off to release. This includes distributing work across different team members to maximize production efficiency of animations of varying scales, from short-form animated explainers to more complex pieces used within our digital products.

• Creative quality, consistency and brand alignment: You’ll ensure projects meet internal standards for quality and output by providing feedback and review sessions, flagging risks early, and ensuring creative expectations are aligned with feasibility and timelines. You’ll also be the main touch point for alignment with the marketing and brand team to ensure consistency with any requirements on their end.

• Promote workflow optimisation: You’ll establish an effective and efficient workflow for asset creators and animators, while identifying opportunities to streamline how we work—whether it’s improving briefing processes, simplifying review cycles, or introducing better tooling or rituals to reduce friction and duplication. A focus on continuous improvement is desired.

• Champion cross-functional communication and stakeholder management: You’ll be the bridge between the Animation team and adjacent functions such as Education, Product, Game Design, and Engineering. You’ll ensure everyone has the right information at the right time, providing stakeholders with estimations and on-going status updates from the team.

• Creative operations management: You’ll also be responsible for other end-to-end operations within or around the animation team, such as ensuring the cooperation with other teams such as Audio Engineering or Branding, monitoring progress, maintaining visibility over blockers, and proactively ensuring deadlines are met without compromising creative integrity.

• Team development: You’ll be responsible for mentoring less experienced team members around both technical, creative, project planning, and communication, contributing to the development of practices and tools that help the whole team grow.

To succeed in the role you will:

• Be highly organised and proactive: Based on your experience, you’ll be able to stay several steps ahead of common problems, balancing deadlines, dependencies, and stakeholder needs, with strong instincts for where bottlenecks might arise.

• Be creatively fluent: You’re expected to deeply understand the work of an animator or asset creator, to be able to accurately plan and manage their work, while occasionally stepping in and providing hands-on assistance to some projects.

• Be a confident communicator: You can switch between creative and technical conversations easily, ensuring everyone is aligned without micromanaging. You’ll keep the right people in the loop and know when to escalate or reset expectations, while being able to use non-technical language to present ideas and defend certain technical options.

• Be calm under pressure: You’ll bring a steady hand when things don’t go to plan, knowing when to adapt, when to push back, and how to regroup with a team-first mindset.

• Be solutions-oriented: You’ll be comfortable working in a team where roles and processes are evolving. You’ll be motivated by building better systems, not just maintaining existing ones, and be able to respond to  strategic shifts within the business as needed.

Skills and Experience

• 7 years of experience in animation production, with at least 3 spent on managing a creative team.

• Proven experience in leading and optimising previous teams’ processes.

• A solid understanding of 2D asset creation and animation workflows, asset pipelines, and tools (eg. Adobe After Effects).

• Previous experience in dealing with managing multiple creative stakeholders including audio engineering, voice actors.

• Familiarity with project management tools like Jira, Trello, or similar.

• Great communication skills, both written and verbal.

• Experience working in or with product development teams is a plus.

• Any exposure to educational or interactive media projects is a strong bonus.

If you require a reasonable adjustment to the application/selection process to enable you to demonstrate your ability to perform the job requirements please include this at the foot of your covering letter. This will help us to understand any modifications we may need to make to support you throughout our selection process.

Benefits:

In return for everything you can bring, we can offer you an exciting role in a fast-growing and dynamic business, with plenty of career opportunities.

• A friendly, welcoming and supportive culture. We believe work should be fun and always put people before the process

• Diversity, inclusion and belonging - our Employee Network Program includes working groups for LGBTQ+, People of Colour, Disabilities (visible and invisible), Women in Tech and Working Parents.

• From day 1 - Westfield Health, 33 annual leave days per year (pro-rata) inclusive bank holidays, a "Me" day each year, a charity day each year, flexible working policy with opportunities to work from home and Twinkl subscriptions.

• Quarterly company awards programme

• Seasonal events

• Referral scheme

• Cervical and Prostate screening

• Company sick pay after 3 months of service 

• After probation - cycle-to-work scheme

• Long-term service reward - Life insurance, enhanced pension contribution, enhanced maternity pay, enhanced adoption pay and enhanced paternity pay, long service award, long service annual leave