Senior Pipeline Technical Director

This role is considered Hybrid, which means the employee will work 2-3 days onsite at a Company designated location and occasionally from home.

Position Summary

A Pipeline TD at Industrial Light & Magic provides direct support to productions and artists. They provide general troubleshooting of pipeline tools in a fast-paced, feature film visual effects production environment, as well as develop and maintain software tools to ensure artist efficiency. As a Senior Pipeline TD, you’ll be handling challenges of greater complexity, guiding colleagues, and will be responsible for longer term project work.

We are currently hiring for our midstream team, which supports Creature Dev, Creature Sim, Crowds, FX, Gen, Environments, Lighting, Lookdev, Groom tools.

What You’ll Do

• Provide front-line production assistance across a wide range of disciplines, troubleshoot assets and shots, and help artists with general problem-solving

• Develop pipeline and asset management tools to meet immediate, show-directed production demands, ensuring facility-wide consistency as directed by show and technical supervisors 

• Work on tools of high complexity and sophistication

• Guide and mentor fellow Pipeline TDs by offering initial support, establishing coding standards, and sharing advancements in the specific domains of the pipeline

• Collaborate directly with engineering teams on technical projects; driving the development and evolution of standards and conventions used in production

• Test and validate tools and techniques in production, working closely with engineering teams in testing, and releasing new and modified software systems

• Collaborate effectively with artists, production supervisors, and technical staff across ILM’s studios globally

• Identify day-to-day priorities in conjunction with show supervisors and team leadership; acting autonomously

• Update documentation for the pipeline and tools to reflect any changes that are made

What We’re Looking For

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related technical field

• At least 8 years production experience in visual effects for film, commercials or television

• Experience with developing, maintaining, and leading projects to completion, working directly with stakeholders, managing expectations and timelines

• Experience developing tools in one or more of Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Mari, Katana, RenderMan or similar

• Comfort communicating cross-discipline and providing innovative solutions to pipeline issues

• A desire to improve efficiencies and eagerness to tackle technical problems daily

• Experience implementing recent technological developments into existing frameworks

• Proficiency in Linux & Python scripting

• Comprehensive knowledge of the entire visual effects process, from shooting to modeling and texturing, animation, rendering and compositing

• Nice to have:

  • Experience with production database systems

  • Experience with C, C++

  • Experience with Windows development and applications, such as 3ds max

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