We’re on the hunt for contractors to join the Coop team in one of two ways: a Character Artist and a Character Animator (two people), or one person who can cover both roles.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll be joining a small team developing a top-down dungeon combat game in Unreal Engine 5. You’ll work closely with a small group of technical designers to replace placeholder meshes and animations. The art style is simple, colourful and cartoony, with some anime-inspired elements. Texturing is mostly done with gradient-based textures.

Character Artist:

If you’re applying as a Character Artist (or covering both roles), you’ll be designing and creating some remaining humanoid characters, enemies and armour pieces. You’ll also be polishing and improving some existing character models.

Character Animator:

If you’re applying as a Character Animator (or covering both roles), you’ll be creating animations for existing skeletal meshes in the project, which may involve some rigging. Working in an external application (such as Blender or Maya) is fine. You’ll be building skeletons, skinning, rigging and animating new humanoid characters and enemies, whether created by you or by a separate Character Artist, and skinning new armour pieces to existing skeletons.

What we’re looking for

For both roles:

1. You’re confident working in Unreal Engine 5, including importing and setting up assets.
2. Ideally you’ve worked on a combat-focused game or prototype, so you know what character work in this context needs to do.

If you’re applying as a Character Artist:

1. Please share a portfolio showing stylised character modelling and texturing.
2. Ideally that portfolio would include stylised or anime-inspired work in line with our artistic direction. Gradient-based texturing is a bonus.

If you’re applying as a Character Animator:

1. Please share a reel showing rigging and game-ready character animation.
2. Ideally you’ve used Unreal’s built-in animation and rigging tools, such as Control Rig and IK Retargeter - but it’s more important to us that you’re happy to get stuck in with them.

We’d like to see that you’ve taken a character from concept through to animating it in-engine. A single project that shows the whole journey is ideal.

Please tell us which role (or roles) you’re applying for. We’d love to know what's unique about your style - your inspirations, and how you express you in your work!

We encourage people from all walks of life to apply. Even if you don’t quite hit each and every point above, if you feel you’d be a good fit for this role we’d still like to hear from you.

Day rate

Exact timings for this work will take shape as we go, and we’ll agree them together with whoever joins us: so rather than set a rate that might not hold, we’d like you to tell us yours. Here’s our current estimate of the work:

1. Character Animator: approx 50-62 days of work
2. Character Artist: approx 13 days of work
3. Character Artist/Animator: approx 75 days of work
4. If you’re covering both roles, we’re looking for someone who can ideally work full-time during the contract period, but the right person is more important. We encourage you to still apply even if full-time isn’t possible for you at the moment: we can discuss exact arrangements as we go.

Please include your day rate in your application, and tell us whether it includes VAT. If you’re covering both roles, a single rate for the whole contract is fine. We’d rather talk about money honestly from the start, so if your rate is outside what we can offer, we’ll tell you quickly rather than leave you waiting.

You’ll work with us as a self-employed contractor and invoice monthly, with payment within 30 days.

Apply

Application deadline: Friday 27th November 2026

Please apply by sending us an email to jobs@coopinnovations.co.uk, including in the subject line which role you’re applying for. Please include your portfolio (Character Artist) and/or character animation and rigging reel (Character Animator), and anything else you’d like to share.

The application process

The entire application process is remote, and we try to keep it short and human. We know interviewing is a big time commitment alongside everything else in your life, so we aim to make decisions as quickly as we can and review applications as we receive them.

1. We’ll review your application, along with your portfolio or reel. If we think you could be a good fit, we’ll send over an NDA for you to sign so we can give you some more details on the project.
2. If we’d both like to take things further, we’ll invite you to a 60 minute video call with some of the development team. We’ll talk through your work, how the project runs and what you’d be doing day to day.
3. We’ll let you know our decision within 5 working days of the call.
4. If we’re offering you the work, we’ll talk through the start date and contract with you.

About Coop

Cooperative Innovations (or “Coop”, as we call ourselves) is a game technology studio founded in 2016. We build games, tools and Unreal Engine systems for teams creating interactive experiences. We work closely with studios, creators and partners at every stage of their development process.

We’re a small, multi-disciplinary team of T-shaped creative people, covering Programming, Production, Technical Design, QA and Operations. Small enough that you’ll get to know everyone well, big enough that there’s real depth of experience to draw on.

We know first-hand where development friction exists, because we’ve lived it through our own game development projects. That experience has shaped the tools we’ve built to solve our problems and now powers the products and services we share with others, including KERNL, our toolkit for development teams and creators.

Our people matter to us. We put great care into how the studio runs day-to-day - how we communicate, how we make decisions, how we look after each other - and we're proud of the team culture we maintain at Coop. It's something we'd want you to feel from the first conversation with us.

Working at Coop

We work mostly asynchronously, which means real flexibility to shape your hours around the rest of your life: family, hobbies, the school run and those unexpected side-quests in your life. Core hours are 10am-3pm UK time, when everyone's around for meetings and synchronous work. Outside that window, you can work any time between 7am and 9pm UK time.

As a remote team, we put real effort into getting together in person too. Every quarter we hold a team day in Leeds for a day of working together and an evening hanging out. If a team day falls during your contract, we’ll cover your travel, accommodation and expenses.