Tools Developer / Pipeline TD

POSITION PURPOSE

Responsible for the overall pipeline development and support. You’d be joining a team on a relatively new workflow where the legacy code would not trouble you and where everyone is nimble and talented enough to make it fascinating growing a feature animation-film pipeline for the long term together.

The Tools Developer/Pipeline TD primary focus could be different depending on what you want to do. You could be asked to concentrate on the flow of data going from one department to the next in our spectacular animation studio, facilitating the data exchange cross-departmentally. But you could also prefer to be involved with the reviews, pushing image representations of our data through the different validation steps if you come from Compositing or you love beautiful imagery (ACES, OCIO, beautiful colors, anyone ?)

In short, you could be asked to support our RV, Syncsketch, Avid, Blender, Nuke, Photoshop tracks intertwined with Shotgrid of course or our Blender, Harmony, Shotgrid, Deadline, Remote work infrastructure as well. But all in the service of the wonderful artists and artisans we have at SPA breaking barriers in modern 2d animation. It is a position that definitely allows one individual to touch on and be exposed to the whole gamut of an Animation Pipeline.
 

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide support for artists in learning and using the pipeline

• Provide support to the Departments and to the Productions in the smooth running of tasks through our pipeline.

• Determine the broad technical and creative approaches, in conjunction with the Head of Pipeline, the Pipeline Team and the CTO

• Propose architecture approaches to Head of Pipeline and CTO for core pipeline elements and standalone tools

• Create facility-based or show-based scripts and tools

• Be an additional point of support for shot based issues, alongside leads and supervisors

• Communicate successes and challenges faced by the team to the Head of Pipeline and CTO

• Act as a liaison for communicating technical issues to IT or Pipeline

• Use time management skills to schedule tasks effectively

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• A degree or equivalent in Computer Graphics, Computer Science or other related course

• A solid understanding in multiple areas within animation software development or animation studios production management (e.g. storyboarding, animation, layout, lighting, rendering, compositing, asset management, color science, user support, etc)

• Prior experience as a Pipeline TD 

• A strong interest in color science, OCIO, color space or display transformations a plus

SKILLS AND ABILITIES

Technical skills

• Experience of Python and shell scripting is required

• Prior knowledge of a variety softwares used in animation is a plus, ideally::

  • one for generalist 3D (ie Maya, Houdini, preferably Blender),

  • one for compositing (ie Fusion, AfterFX, preferably Nuke),

  • one for 2D drawing and animation (ie Photoshop, Flash, preferably Harmony)

  • one for production tracking (FTrack, Kitsu, preferably ShotGrid)

• Solid and clean coding practices to understand and expand on our existing code base

• Not intimidated by peer reviews while code-developing

• A knack for UI/UX (both design methodology and knowledge of frameworks as Qt) is a great plus and we might ask you to use that skill.

• Experience with modern data formats and APIs like Alembic, USD, or VDB a plus

Core skills

• Big picture problem solver

• Interest in monitoring and identifying potential inefficiencies in a production pipeline

  • Ability to troubleshoot and deal with competing priorities and projects

  • Good at anticipating the downstream impacts (on other departments, on future projects)

• Team oriented with good communication skills

  • Have a knack for helping others and taking pleasure in making artists’ life easier

  • Ability to take direction and feedback from a supervisor or a peer

  • Ability to give constructive feedback and guidance to peers

• Good handling pressure

  • Ability to work in a sometimes tight-deadline environment.

  • Ability to derive the path to take for implementation given a particular time constraint is always a plus