Staff Production Engineer, Platform - ILM London

Position Summary

We seek Engineers to join our Platform Team and help us develop tools and services that support production techniques across all areas of visual effects, feature animation, and real-time content production.

Who We Are:

Industrial Light & Magic, founded in 1975 by George Lucas, has created some of the most iconic moments in motion picture history. From Star Wars to Jurassic Park, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, The Avengers, theme park rides and interactive experiences, ILM continues to expand the possibilities of what visual entertainment can be.

ILM’s Core Pipeline Department develops the ground-breaking technology that empowers our artists to create dazzling visuals. ILM’s innovations have won 34 Scientific and Technical Academy Awards®. Today, we are 70+ visually-minded software engineers, working side-by-side with over a thousand digital artists in a fast-paced, intensely collaborative, creative film production environment, across studios in San Francisco, Vancouver, London, Sydney, and Mumbai.

At ILM, a good idea is a good idea, regardless of where it comes from! Do you thrive in a creative environment? Do you enjoy sharing knowledge and learning from others? If you love art, technology, and movies, then this might be the role you’re looking for.

Responsibilities include:

• Working with engineers across all of ILM’s studios, splitting time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day artist support, consultation, and problem-solving.

• Collaborating with R&D teams in developing and deploying the next generation of machine-learning-based tools wherever applicable.

• Working closely with development teams to ensure applications are designed for scalability, reliability, and performance.

• Designing, deploying, and maintaining distributed, multi-region, highly scalable, and reliable services to improve developer productivity and experience. 

• Building and maintaining effective monitoring, logging, and alerting systems.

• Implementing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) practices.

• Continuously improving our application infrastructure and processes.

• Driving discussions about the future of the developer platform at ILM.

• Providing support in the event of critical service downtime.

We welcome engineers with a passion for applying the latest machine learning technology to these challenges and more!

What to Bring:

• Knowledge of and/or eagerness to learn principles of visual effects, potentially with a specialty such as modeling, animation, lighting, rendering, image processing, etc.

• Demonstrable comprehensive experience with professional software development and/or VFX production.

• Specialized skills and expertise that allow you to take a broad strategic perspective. 

• The ability to lead teams and projects. 

• Appreciation of software development practices: object-oriented design, test-focused development, source code management, build and release processes.

• Experience with MLOps techniques, processes, and toolsets.

• Expert knowledge of Python and the Linux environment.

• Experience working with network and application protocols like NFS, TCP, gRPC and HTTP.

• Experience with several relational or NoSQL technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra and Elasticsearch.

• Experience building and operating Kubernetes clusters in production.

• Experience with infrastructure as code such as Terraform, Ansible.

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience with monitoring and logging tools such as ELK stack, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog.

• Knowledge of or expertise with SRE practices.

• Experience designing and implementing distributed systems in multi-region and hybrid environments.

Education / Experience:

• BS and/or advanced degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent  level of experience.

This role is Hybrid, which means the employee will be required to work a minimum of 2 days on-site per week at a Company designated location, and occasionally from home.

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