Job Summary

At Walt Disney Animation Studios we have a deep commitment to the philosophy that creativity inspires technology, and technology inspires creativity. Engineers on our Production Technology team develop and implement new algorithms to solve challenging problems for all of our animated content. Through constant collaboration with artists and end users, Production Technology creates the tools, environments, and pipelines that our production teams use daily.

We are looking for a Sr. Software Engineer to join our Production Technology team, as a member of the team responsible for interactive visualization and real-time renderers at our studio. In this role, you will partner with artists, studio leadership, technical directors, cross-team software engineers, Disney Research, and other stakeholders across the Walt Disney family of Studios. Your work will focus on the design and implementation of innovative workflows, as well as state-of-the-art solutions motivated by our long term vision for Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Projects Include: 

• Developing Real-Time Interactive GPU-accelerated renderers for use in film making.

• Working closely with Artists and Technical Directors to solve complex problems and support artist workflows.

• Support a spectrum of rendering technologies from high-performance Virtual Production (VR) all the way through to Cinematic Visual Quality.

• Contributing to development and extension of an Open Source Graphics Engine and associated render pipelines.

• Integration of our real-time graphics solutions into various digital content creation applications.

What does it mean to be a part of Production Technology?

• Our engineers get the opportunity to work on the full stack of our tools, from developing the underlying algorithms, through to building intuitive & artist-friendly interfaces.

• We work in a collaborative, cross-site environment in the pursuit of simple and performant solutions to complex problems.

• The team works hand in hand with artists to make the tools we need for the incredibly complex and rich characters and environments featured in our movies.

• Develop new artist-centric interaction models using the latest hardware and technologies.

Key Qualifications:

• At least 4 years designing and developing complex user facing software, ideally in a studio or game production environment.

• Proficiency in Modern C/C++, with the ability to quickly produce clear, testable code.

• Experience writing and debugging multithreaded applications including an understanding of asynchronous processing and vectorized SIMD execution.

• Experience with performance measurement, profiling and analysis tools.

• Experience with modern graphics pipelines, including CPU and GPU hardware, as applied to real-time graphics techniques and algorithms.

• Strong communication, teamwork and problem solving skills.

• Ability to balance the timeliness of solutions with their sustainability and to prioritize competing demands based on business value.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience with underlying real-time graphics engine frameworks and components, such as can be found in Open Source engines like Unity and Unreal.

• Strong mathematical fundamentals, including linear algebra, statistics and numerical methods.

• Knowledge of Modern GPU programming APIs such as Vulkan, DirectX, Metal or OpenGL.

• Knowledge of graphics shading languages, such as GLSL or HLSL or Cuda.

• Familiarity developing in content creation applications such as Maya or Houdini.

• Familiarity with industry standard formats such as USD, FBX, Alembic, Ptex, or EXR.

Required Education

• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or equivalent experience.

#DisneyTech