Gym Class is a top-rated social VR game on Meta Quest with over 70,000 reviews and a 4.9-star rating​. Millions of players join to connect with friends, explore social worlds, and engage in competitive games. The community launched around basketball, and is now expanding rapidly into more categories.

The company's mission is to connect the world by simulating it. To achieve this, Gym Class recently raised over $8M from the world's top technology investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, the National Basketball Association, the Golden State Warriors, top NBA players like Kevin Durant, Lonzo Ball, Andre Iguodala, Soma Capital, Founders Inc., Danny Green, Zaza Pachulia, Todd and Rahul's Angel Fund, Balaji Srinivasan, and more. In 2023, the company announced a licensing relationship with the NBA.

Learn more at gymclass.com or follow @gymclassvr.

Role Summary

Gym Class is a top-rated VR sports game on Meta Quest – backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, the NBA, and prominent NBA players. Millions of players worldwide join Gym Class to connect with friends, explore social sports worlds, and engage in competitive games. What began as a community around virtual basketball is rapidly expanding into new sports like football, baseball, and more, driven by our mission to connect the world by simulating it.

As a Contract Animator at Gym Class, you will play a key role in bringing our players and NPCs to life. You’ll process and integrate animation clips from third-party libraries, motion capture data, and other sources into Unity, creating smooth and realistic player movements. You’ll collaborate with our co-founders, Unity engineers, content creators, and designers to ensure animations are not only visually impressive but also enhance gameplay and feel great in VR and mobile.

This role can start as a 3-6 month contract position (remote-friendly), depending on your preference, with the potential for extension or transition into a longer-term role based on performance and company needs. Join Gym Class if you’re excited to work at the frontier of social gaming and spatial computing, get energized by a passionate community of players, and want to grow your career alongside a world-class.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Animate & Integrate: Process, refine, and integrate animations from motion capture and third-party libraries into the Unity engine, ensuring seamless blending and high-quality, realistic motion for in-game athletes. Create unique animation clips using Maya.
• Gameplay Animation: Create and polish character animations for a variety of actions (running, jumping, shooting, dribbling, etc.), capturing the authenticity and excitement of real sports within a VR and mobile environment.
• Collaboration: Work closely with co-founders, designers, other animators, Unity engineers, and content creators to implement animations that align with gameplay requirements and technical constraints. Incorporate feedback from team members to continuously improve animation quality.
• Iteration & Quality: Test animations in-game (using VR headsets, mobile, and Unity editor) to validate their feel and timing. Iterate rapidly based on internal testing and community feedback, troubleshooting and polishing animations to achieve a smooth, immersive player experience.
• Optimization: Ensure animations are optimized for performance on Meta Quest and mobile hardware – managing rig complexity, keyframe data, and blending techniques to maintain high frame rates without sacrificing quality in a multiplayer setting.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Unity Animation Expertise: Strong experience with the Unity game engine and its animation system (Mecanim). Proven ability to set up animation state machines, blend trees, and animation events.
• Animation Integration Skills: Proficient in working with motion capture data and third-party animation clips, with the ability to retarget, tweak, and integrate these assets into Unity for use in-game.
• Sports Game Experience: Experience working on sports games or other character-intensive, real-time games. A keen understanding of athletic movement and timing (experience animating humanoid characters in dynamic action is a plus).
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Excellent teamwork and communication skills. Comfortable collaborating with engineers, artists, designers, and content creators to achieve shared goals in a fast-paced development environment.
• Tools & Technical Skills: Proficiency with industry-standard 3D animation tools such as Maya or MotionBuilder for creating and editing animation clips. Familiarity with rigging, inverse kinematics (IK), and character physics setups is a bonus.
• Portfolio/Reel: A portfolio or demo reel showcasing your best character animations (ideally including examples of realistic human movement or sports-related animations).

PAY & BENEFITS

• Competitive Compensation: We offer a highly competitive contract rate commensurate with your experience and skills for the 3-6 month duration, depending on your preference.
• Remote-Friendly: Work from anywhere – our team is distributed and we value results over hours in the office. (Our core team operates across US/Canada time zones, but we are flexible for the right candidate.)
• Opportunity for Extension: High performers will be considered for contract extension or transition to a longer-term or full-time role with Gym Class.
• Cutting-Edge Experience: Work on a groundbreaking VR project with a passionate, supportive team. You’ll gain invaluable experience in VR gaming and have a direct impact on a product enjoyed by a large community of players.

• VR: Unity, Maya, Blender, Normcore.
• Backend: Node, AWS (dynamodb, lambda, api gateway, redis, etc).
• Data & Analytics: Bigquery, Mixpanel
• Web: React, Vercel, Cloudflare.
• Mobile: React Native and Unity