Lead Animator II

Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

Police primarily go though 40-hours of in-service training outside of the academy a year, where most of that time is spent on topics like firearm recertification, CPR recertification, and other various topics. There is not enough time to train on all the things police need to be aware of. Additionally, if they do learn it at their in-service, they practice it once or twice and then are expected to remember what they learned 8 months down the road when they encounter that situation, under stress. Our goal is to make training that can be more accessible, more memorable, and done more frequently. We call this “Roll Call” training and it is training that can be done before and after a shift to keep skills sharp. 

The problem we are trying to solve is simple: public-safety training is broken. When we think about the ways police train today, there are several key challenges: ineffective training, training that is not scalable, and cost. 

Axon’s VR team strives to create engaging and effective training that provides scenario feedback. Our mission is to help make Community Engagement Training and less-lethal weapon training (like TASER) so that officers are prepared to use these alternatives to Use of Force. Given that majority police interactions involve verbal and non-verbal interactions, we are putting an emphasis on hand gestures and natural language processing to factor in the trainee’s body language, as well as what they say and how they say it. The vision is that co-operatively will impact how the trainee interacts with the NPC (Non-Playable Characters) in the training scenario. During training, a trainer can observe and later provide feedback to the trainee. These tools connect back to the Axon Ecosystem, which consists of Axon Academy, Axon Evidence, Axon Performance, and Axon Standards.

Your Impact

We are working with cutting edge technology and need your help to make it all come together. You'll join a varied team focused on important public safety training topics. Your work will involve using virtual reality (VR) to enhance officers' empathy, coping, and de-escalation training to help officers engage with greater awareness and safety within their communities. 

We believe that happy teams make the best products, so we foster a welcoming, open, introspective team culture that encourages everyone to speak their mind, collaborate together, and have fun. The team conducts daily check-ins, open format meetings, as well as a weekly VR Happy Hour in headset! 

We believe we can only succeed if we deeply understand our customers and get to know them. We spend a lot of time with law enforcement officers to learn about their needs, watch their experience and understand the real impact of our work. We also work closely with our Axon Community Impact team, along with other community subject experts to create our content and curriculum to reflect the needs of both law enforcement + community.

What You’ll Do

Location: Work from home as much as you want, live nearby any of our awesome US R&D Hubs (Seattle, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Denver, Atlanta, or Boston) so you can easily collab in-person when it’s helpful and be an active part of our vibrant Axon culture. 
Reports to: Art Director, AR/VR 
Direct Reports: None

What about the day-to-day?

We are seeking a skilled and innovative Lead Animator with a well-developed focus on training and virtual reality (VR) to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have a deep knowledge of Animation principles, narrative design, a passion for VR technologies, and experience animating realistic characters and with motion capture. You will work closely with Artists, Designers, Product Managers, Developers, and Subject Matter Experts to create natural animations for our VR training experiences that are both immersive and educational.

• Cross-functional leader, leading the development of Animation for Axon VR simulator
• Lead our Animation Team to build natural, believable character animation
• Work with Tech Artists and Tech Animators to define and advance the Animati