Job Description
Who We Are:
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 Core Pipeline Department 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.
Summary of the Role:
This role is considered Hybrid, which means the employee will work 2-3 days onsite at a Company designated location and occasionally from home.
We seek engineers to join our Production Tools Team and help is develop tools and services to support Editorial, 2D media, Dailies and Review pipelines for visual effects, feature animation, and real-time content production.
We welcome engineers with a passion for developing production tracking solutions!
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 Core Pipeline group embraces promising individuals with a variety backgrounds and experiences.
What You’ll Do:
- Work with engineers across all of ILM’s studios, splitting time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day production support, consultation, and problem-solving.
- Develop software using modern practices in RESTful APIs, frameworks like via FastAPI, work in web stacks implemented with TypeScript and React, administer databases in SQL or PostgreSQL, leverage message queues like RabbitMQ and Kafka, and leverage deployment tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Ansible.
- Work in a collaborative, distributed team of full-time software engineers and media experts in researching, developing, and supporting ILM’s editorial, production tracking, media transformation, dailies and review tools that scale to high-volume visual effects and animation production.
- Work directly with highly specialized and talented artists in active film and TV production in ILM’s global studios.
- Analyze and optimize the media pipelines in active production. Advise creative leadership on media pipeline approach and strategy.
- Liaise with other Core Pipeline teams to incorporate shared services, partner with other Walt Disney Studios like Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios as well as other industry groups to create the best work possible at ILM.
What to Bring:
- Proficiency in Python and the Linux environment.
- Appreciation of software development principles: object-oriented design, test-driven development, source code management, build and release processes.
- An intuitive understanding of the demands of a fast-paced, creative industry.
- Communication: an ability to express yourself concisely, a willingness to speak up, and a conviction to keep everyone informed of progress and problems.
- Empathy: an ability to listen intently and recognise artists’ needs.
- Creativity: an insightful and analytical thinker, and a creative problem solver.
- Experience on system design; utilising scalable architectures and working with a large, complex, mature, and dynamic codebase.
- Proficiency with several relational or NoSQL technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and Elasticsearch.
- Nice to have: Familiarity with RV, Nuke, AVID and/or similar 2D media tools; knowledge of open standards such as OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, OpenTimelineIO and ffmpeg; experience with containerisation, continuous integration, and automated deployment
Education / Experience:
- BS or advanced degree in computer science or related field, or similar experience.
- 5+ years or demonstrated experience with professional software development and/or VFX production.
JoinILM
The hiring range for this position in Vancouver is C$122,400 to C$156,800 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors. A full range of medical, financial, and/or other variable pay or benefits, may be offered dependent on the level and position offered.