Disney Looking for R&D Look-Development/Rendering Engineer at Vancouver, BC Full Time

Position Summary

We are looking for engineers for our Look-Development/Rendering R&D team to help advance our Katana/RenderMan/Mari-based lighting and look-development tools and high-performance, photorealistic visual effects pipeline in general.

The tools and workflows we’re developing include:

• Integration of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) as a canonical representation of complex scenes, effects, and lighting data
• MaterialX and the Lama layered material definition
• Efficient texturing and UV coordinate layout pipeline
• Multi-shot and sequence-based lighting workflows
• Smooth integration between interactive and distributed batch render queuing

If you are interested in the role, please apply even if your experience and skills don’t perfectly match our ideal credentials.

What You’ll Do

• Work in a collaborative, distributed team of full-time software engineers, and work directly with highly specialized and talented artists in ILM’s studios in San Francisco, Singapore, Vancouver, London, and Sydney
• Design artist-friendly user interfaces, robust data management and scene assembly systems, and special purpose content creation tools that scale to high-volume photo-realistic visual effects production
• Collaborate closely with commercial software vendors
• Work in a large, complex, mature, and dynamic code base
• Split time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day production support

What We’re Looking For

• BS or advanced degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience
• 3+ years of experience in professional software development and/or VFX production
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python on Linux
• Thorough knowledge of principles of computer graphics, especially modeling, texturing, and shading: path tracing, light transport, high-dynamic-range imagery, color science, proceduralism and instancing, material definition, deformation and caching, texturing and UV layout
• Experience with Katana, Mari and/or other commercial lighting/painting/texturing software applications
• Working knowledge of standard data formats: OpenEXR, Alembic, USD, etc. Experience with shading languages, GLSL in particular, is a plus.
• Experience designing artist-friendly interfaces using GUI toolkits: Qt, PySide, etc.
• Thorough knowledge of software development principles: object-oriented design, test-driven development, source code management, build and release processes

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