R&D Fx/Crowds Engineer

Position Summary

We are looking for engineers for our FX/Crowds R&D team to help develop tools and pipelines for simulating natural phenomena, rigid-body destruction, and crowds for major motion pictures.

We’re looking for engineers who can work closely with artists and other developers to author tools, pipelines, and solvers for physics-based simulation, fluid dynamics, and/or procedural simulation of crowds in Houdini. We need people who are passionate about overcoming technical and creative challenges to meet the needs of production on our upcoming slate of Hollywood blockbusters.

What You’ll Do:

• Work in a large, complex, mature, and dynamic code base
• Integrate commercial and open-source systems into the ILM production pipeline
• Design innovative algorithms, artist-friendly user interfaces, especially SOP and HDA user interfaces, and automated batch processes that scale to high volume visual effects production; design systems that simplify complex FX and crowds simulation processes.
• Split time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day production support
• 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, Sydney, and Mumbai

What We're Looking For:

• Thorough knowledge of software design/development principles: design patterns, object-oriented design, source code management, build and release processes, test-driven development, agile methodology, etc.
• Experience with Houdini, as both a user and/or plugin developer
• Experience designing interfaces using GUI toolkits: Qt, PySide, etc.
• 3+ years of experience in professional software development and/or VFX production
• Thorough knowledge of technology related to one or more aspects of FX or crowds simulation: physics, numerical techniques, procedural geometry, procedural crowd animation, etc.
• BS or advanced degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python on Linux
• Knowledge of industry-standard scene data formats: Alembic, USD, OpenVDB, etc.

Join ILM