Overview

R&D Developer – Project Lead (Caribou): Image Engine, Vancouver, BC
CONTRACT: Starting May 2016
PROJECT: TBD
 

ABOUT IMAGE ENGINE
Well known for our work on Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Image Engine has gone on to create numerous incredible creatures, epic environments and extraordinary digital effects for a broad range of feature films! We are an independently owned and operated company, led by a team of creative and passionate individuals who are committed to furthering the art of visual storytelling, and helping our exceptionally talented crew to push the boundaries of artistic and technical achievement at our studio.

POSITION PURPOSE
Are you the newest core member of our self-motivated and highly proficient R&D team?

Are you up for the challenge of leading development on Caribou: Image Engine’s in-house Lookdev and Lighting software? Are you excited to contribute to the open-source community, via the Gaffer frameworks for procedural scene generation and rendering? Are you passionate about creating a fast, efficient, unified rendering experience for artists across all departments in the studio, and around the world?

Our mission is to make it faster and easier for our artists to create and iterate, with tools they find intuitive and enjoy using.

We’re excited to find the next great member of our team!

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Lead the design and development of our host-agnostic Lookdev & Lighting engine, embedded within Maya, Houdini, and Nuke.
  • Design, implement, and support a mixture of proprietary, open-source, and third-party software for areas of VFX Productions related to rendering and procedural scene generation / assembly.
  • Contribute to Image Engine’s open source initiatives: Cortex and Gaffer
  • Collaborate with artists, technical directors, and supervisors to determine the software needs for current and future productions
  • Work with the R&D Lead and Head of Technical Production to plan and carry out long term strategical projects for the R&D department
  • Take ownership as the point person for several major development projects
  • Identify and optimize bottlenecks in algorithms and workflows
  • Design and implement solutions targeting current production workflows, while ensuring they can be generalized for all productions when possible
  • Document, test, and debug tools to ensure they meet production requirements
  • Write clear documentation for libraries, scripts, and plugins
  • Mentor and train junior and mid-level software developers within the R&D team
  • Communicate with third-party software vendors to prioritize Image Engine’s feature requests and bug fixes
  • Provide secondary technical support, training, and tutorials to artists and production staff
  • Stay up-to-date with industry trends across several areas of VFX research and production

EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE

  • A university degree in Computer Science, Math, Physics, or a related field
  • Master’s or PhD in Computer Science or a related field a plus
  • A solid understanding of several areas within VFX software development (e.g. shading, lighting, rendering, procedural scene generation, fur etc)

SKILLS & ABILITIES
Technical skills

  • Proficient experience writing software in C++ and Python
  • Experience developing for Maya and Houdini  in both C++ and Python
  • Experience developing software and deploying it in a production environment
  • Experience developing in a Linux environment
  • Excellent troubleshooting and debugging skills

Core skills

  • Ability to switch between several long and short term development projects in varying sub-disciplines of VFX
  • Excellent written and verbal communications skills
  • Self-motivated, with proven ability to work with a high-degree of autonomy, as well as contribute to a team