Staff AI VFX Engineer

About this role

The Opportunity  

As AI rapidly transforms creative industries, professional production workflows must evolve alongside it. At   Firefly Foundry ,   we’re   leading an industry-first initiative to define how generative AI integrates into high-end visual effects for feature films and episodic content. A   major franchise holder   doesn’t   get a generic   model;   they get a model that knows   their   characters, 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, and   establishing   AI as a new, fully realized field within visual effects.   That’s   exactly what   we’re   building. At Firefly 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.  

We’re   looking for pioneers who want to help define what AI-driven VFX looks like at the highest level.   You’ll   work directly with studios, VFX houses, and creative leadership to take Firefly Foundry from pilot to production-scale deployment.  

What   You’ll   Do  

• Build and   validate   AI-driven VFX workflows:   Design end-to-end pipelines that integrate Firefly Foundry’s custom-trained diffusion and video models into compositing, look-dev,   previs , and virtual production.   You’ll   write working prototypes ,   not slide decks   to   prove out   new approaches   with real shot data.  

• Solve hard production problems:   Tackle the issues that   block   adoption: temporal coherence across shot sequences,   maintaining   art-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 Firefly 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 pipelines ,   including 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 Firefly Foundry engineering teams.   You’re   the bridge between what a VFX supervisor needs at 2 AM during a color session and what our model architecture can deliver.  

• Implement and prototype   multi-modal model orchestration:   Firefly Foundry   doesn’t   ship a single model . I t   ships   a coordinated stack of image, video, animation, and 3D generation models that need to work together. You’ll design the orchestration layer: how a character generated in the image model maintains identity when animated by the   video model; how texture maps generated for Substance 3D   stay   consistent with hero shots generated in the image pipeline; how style transfer models constrain the output space to a franchise’s 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.   You’ll   need 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 deployment   patterns   so the next studio engagement   doesn’t   start from scratch .  

Required  

• 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-dev,   previs / postvis , editorial handoff, and review ( Shotgrid , Frame.io, or equivalent).  

• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals   e.g.   diffusion   models,   LoRA /fine-tuning, ControlNet-style conditioning, prompt engineering, and   evaluation   metrics (FID, CLIP, perceptual loss). You   don’t   need to have trained a model from scratch, but you need to understand   what’s   happening under the hood well enough to debug workflow failures.  

• Proficiency   in 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, Alembic,   OpenColorIO .  

• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical studio leadership. Strong written communication ,   you 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, Runway,   ComfyUI , 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).  

Who   You’ll   Work With  

Firefly Foundry Applied Scientists , product engineers,   VFX and M&E Solutions Engineers, Adobe product teams across Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Substance 3D, and Frame.io, plus Customer Success, Security/Privacy/Legal, and Partner/Alliances. Externally,   you’ll   be embedded with studio technical leadership, VFX supervisors, and pipeline teams.  

Logistics  

• Location: Hybrid/Remote flexible.  

• Travel: ~10–15% to studios, post houses, production locations, and industry events (SIGGRAPH, NAB, VES, etc.).  

Why This Role

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