Staff AI VFX Engineer

The Opportunity

As AI rapidly transforms creative industries professional production workflows must evolve alongside it. AtFirefly Foundrywereleading an industry-first initiative to define how generative AI integrates into high-end visual effects for feature films and episodic content. Amajor franchise holderdoesntget a genericmodel;they get a model that knowstheircharacters environments and visual style integrated directly into production-grade tools.

Generative AI has limited practical application in VFX pipelines with real world production challenges. The true breakthrough will come from achieving production-grade quality deeply integrating with existing DCC tools andestablishingAI as a new fully realized field within visual effects.Thatsexactly whatwerebuilding. At Foundry we approach this work with a deep respect for the artistry and craft of VFX. Our mission is grounded in empowering artists while ensuring the responsible and commercially safe use of AI in production environments.

Werelooking for pioneers who want to help define what AI-driven VFX looks like at the highest level.Youllwork directly with studios VFX houses and creative leadership to take Foundry from pilot to production-scale deployment.

WhatYoullDo

• Build andvalidateAI-driven VFX workflows:Design end-to-end pipelines that integrate Foundrys custom-trained diffusion and video models into compositing look-devprevis and virtual production.Youllwrite working prototypesnot slide deckstoprove outnew approacheswith real shot data.

• Solve hard production problems:Tackle the issues thatblockadoption: temporal coherence across shot sequencesmaintainingart-directable control over generated elements matching on-set lighting and lens characteristics and hitting the fidelity bar that supervisors demand.

• Own the integration surface:Define how Foundry models plug into Nuke Houdini Maya After Effects Premiere Pro and Substance 3D. Design the APIs node graphs and plugin architectures that make AI-generated assets first-class citizens in existing pipelinesincluding USD/OpenEXR/ACES-compliant outputs.

• Shape the product from the production floor:Translate what you learn from studio engagements into concrete product requirements for the Firefly and Foundry engineering teams.Yourethe bridge between what a VFX supervisor needs at 2 AM during a color session and what our model architecture can deliver.

• Implement and prototypemulti-modal model orchestration:Foundrydoesntship a single model. Itshipsa coordinated stack of image video animation and 3D generation models that need to work together. Youll design the orchestration layer: how a character generated in the image model maintains identity when animated by thevideo model; how texture maps generated for Substance 3Dstayconsistent with hero shots generated in the image pipeline; how style transfer models constrain the output space to a franchises visual language across all modalities.

• Engage studio and VFX leadership:Present to CTOs VFX supervisors and heads of production. Run technical deep-dives and creative workshops.Youllneed to be as credible talking to a Nuke compositor as you are in a boardroom with studio executives.

• Codify repeatable playbooks:Document reference architectures prompt engineering strategies for VFX use cases quality evaluation pipelines and deploymentpatternsso the next studio engagementdoesntstart from scratch.

• 5 - 10 years in VFX engineering pipeline TD or tools development with shipped credits in film episodic or AAA gaming.

• Deep fluency in production VFX workflows: compositing (Nuke) 3D (Maya/Houdini) rendering look-devprevis/postvis editorial handoff and review (Shotgrid or equivalent).

• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentalse.g.diffusionmodelsLoRA/fine-tuning ControlNet-style conditioning prompt engineering andevaluationmetrics (FID CLIP perceptual loss). Youdontneed to have trained a model from scratch but you need to understandwhatshappening under the hood well enough to debug workflow failures.

• Proficiencyin Python and at least one of C Rust or TypeScript. Comfortable writing production-quality code not just scripts.

• Familiarity with VFX data standards:OpenEXR ACES USD AlembicOpenColorIO.

• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical studio leadership. Strong written communicationyou can write a clear 1-pager or technical design doc.

Preferred

• Credits on major feature films or high-profile episodic VFX (think tentpole-scale not just indie shorts).

• Experience with real-time rendering (Unreal Engine virtual production stages LED volumes).

• Hands-on experience fine-tuning or deploying generative models (Stable Diffusion RunwayComfyUI or similar).

• Background in computer vision or image processing (optical flow segmentation depth estimation upscaling).

• Prior experience in a customer-facing technical role (solutions engineer field CTO technical account lead).

WhoYoullWork With

Firefly Foundry Applied Scientists product engineersVFX and M&E Solutions Engineers Adobe product teams across Firefly Photoshop Premiere Pro After Effects Substance 3D and plus Customer Success Security/Privacy/Legal and Partner/Alliances. Externallyyoullbe embedded with studio technical leadership VFX supervisors and pipeline teams.

Logistics

• Location: Hybrid/Remote flexible.

• Travel: 1015% to studios post houses production locations and industry events (SIGGRAPH NAB VES etc.).

Why This Role

• Youllbe defining a categorynotiterating onan existing product. Custom-trained generative AI for VFX productiondoesnthave a playbook yet.Yourewriting it.

• Adobes creative tool ecosystem (Photoshop Premiere After Effects Substance 3D ) gives Foundry a distribution and integration advantage that no pure-play AI startup can match.

• Youll work directly with major studios and franchise holders on IP that youllactually seeon screen.

• Youllhave a direct line from field reality to product roadmapthe kind of influence that senior engineers at most companies never get.

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