Production Engineering Intern (Summer 2025)

Industrial Light & Magic, founded in 1975 by George Lucas, has created some of the most iconic moments in motion picture history. From Star Wars to Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, The Avengers, theme park rides and interactive experiences, ILM continues to expand the possibilities of what visual entertainment can be.

ILM’s Production Engineering group develops the ground-breaking technology that empowers our artists to create dazzling visuals. ILM’s innovations have won 34 Scientific and Technical Academy Awards®. Today, we are 70+ visually-minded software engineers, working side-by-side with over a thousand digital artists in a fast-paced, intensely collaborative, creative film production environment, across studios in San Francisco, Vancouver, London, Sydney, and Mumbai.

Position Summary

16 weeks, paid internship, commencing Summer 2025. Open to BC residents only who currently have the right to work in Canada.

Production Engineers build and maintain software used by other developers and artists within ILM spanning domains such as our media creation pipeline, software building, deployment and monitoring, as well as artist-facing tooling in digital content creation software such as Maya, Nuke, and Katana.

This internship will give you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with a professional engineering environment, receive mentorship from leaders in the VFX industry, and contribute to real projects during your internship. This is a great opportunity to develop professional interpersonal skills as well as practical experience in this field.

We seek interns to join one of our many Production Engineering teams and help us develop tools and production techniques across all areas of visual effects and feature animation production:

• Image processing, compositing, and rotoscoping, including depth estimation, image segmentation, generative in-painting, and plate relighting.
• Simulating natural phenomena, rigid-body destruction, crowds and procedural animation.
• Lighting, texturing, look-development, and layered material definition.
• Modelling, rigging, and animation of bodies and faces, including soft-body dynamic simulation of cloth, hair, and flesh.
• Tools, structures, and pipeline systems that define how artists assemble and manage massively complex 3D scenes, and user interfaces for authoring, validating, publishing, and tracking 3D and 2D data as it moves through a network of automated batch processes.

We welcome candidates with a passion for applying the latest machine learning technology to these challenges and more!

At ILM, a good idea is a good idea, regardless of where it comes from! Do you thrive in a creative environment? Do you enjoy sharing knowledge and learning from others? If you love art, technology, and movies, then this might be the role you’re looking for.

ILM strives to be an inclusive environment, and the Technology department in particular embraces promising individuals with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

What you'll do:

• Develop tools and/or services for one of our Production Engineering teams.
• Work with engineers across all of ILM’s studios, splitting time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day artist support, consultation, and problem-solving.

What you bring:

• Pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a related field (candidates within one year of graduation are also welcome).
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with strong interpersonal skills.
• Proficiency in Linux as well as a programming language like Python or C++.
• Passion for applying technology to film and visual effects.
• Ability to work autonomously and in team settings with a positive, pro-active attitude.

Bonus Points:

• Experience using Maya, Houdini, Katana, Mari or other digital content creation applications.
• Proven experience with machine learning, web frameworks, and/or data stores.
• Familiarity with industry-standard data formats like OpenEXR, OpenVDB, Alembic, and USD.
• Passion for designing artist-friendly interfaces using GUI toolkits: Qt, PySide, QML, etc. You don’t need to be a professional UX designer, but you should have a keen sense for how creative people use technology to work together in production.
• Appreciation of software development principles: object-oriented design, test-driven development, source code management, build and release processes. 
• Familiarity with film and video postproduction and/or computer graphics techniques is highly desired.