Applied online, got a call from EA the next day. They setup a interview time in the same week, so the whole process took a week. The HR was nice and answered all the queries I had regarding the position.
The HR mentioned that after the 1 year contract has expired they wont hire you back for 3 months. The employees who are already working there say that the chances of someone getting re-hired is very subjective on demand hence contract people would most likely have to look elsewhere during the last months of the contract. The HR said that people are >OK< with this type of method/business model but I highly doubt people prefer to be jobless for three months vs having a stable career.
1:1 interview was of two rounds, the Senior CG supervisors took the 1st round - the technical test and the Computer Graphics supervisors took the the 2nd round of behavioral and experience based questions.
The technical round was based on my background, the questions asked are below but the 1st round interviews had conflict in approach, they were arguing within themselves. This was a 1 hr interview and they ended up asking school questions instead of relevant experience based questions, this was no where near what was described in the job description.
For future Technical artist:
If your background is in Engineering/Software, they will ask you questions just like a software engineer even though the position is that of a technical artists.
If you background is in Art, they will still ask you technical questions related to Art pipeline and scripting.
So either ways you will have to know about programming/engineering concepts from a book-ish/theory/concept perspectivem your industry experience will have zero value here.