Hi dissonanceint,
I would suggest use the camera in UE4 rather than importing one from Maya.
I hope I’m not misunderstanding your issue but it sounds like the scaling for you character could be off.
Make sure that your character and animations are scaled correctly before export them into UE4 and then setup the camera as a component. As a reference, you could export the mesh of the First Person Template and size your character against it.
I hope that helps, TJ