Senior Rendering Engineer

Push forward the bleeding edge of rendering while delivering some of the industry’s most ambitious films and television series with the Wētā FX Rendering Research department. We develop in-house renderers to bring the best in modern high-performance rendering to world class productions such as The Lord of the Rings, Avatar and the Planet of the Apes franchises which have earned six visual effects Academy Awards®.

We are looking for an experienced rendering engineer who is energized to make sure our users are working productively and successfully with our in-house production renderer Manuka through robust USD integration, highly performant scene ingestion, and flexibility to work and improve upon a wide range of rendering subsystems. This position is for our Wellington, New Zealand office.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

  • Implement and design core rendering front-end systems, with a focus on ensuring efficient data flow and compute scheduling for performant scene ingestion into the renderer, from sources such as USD for offline as well as interactive rendering.
  • Analyse and optimize system performance to successfully render the most complex scenes in the industry.
  • Proactively test new and existing features to ensure smooth roll outs and the highest levels of quality.
  • Improve and upgrade existing systems for robustness, maintainability, and performance.
  • Provide hands-on user support. Find and fix bugs. Sit with artists. Author high quality internal and end-user documentation.
  • Share senior project leadership responsibilities, such as planning and tracking development tasks, engaging with users, and collaborating with other departments.

Skills & Experience Required:

  • Master's degree in computer science or related field.
  • 4+ years of industry rendering development experience in C++.
  • Extensive experience working with USD and rendering front-end systems.
  • Expertise in software design for large high-performance systems, including API design, scheduling techniques, and data management.
  • Strong algorithmic background and experience writing high performance multi-threaded systems.
  • Comfortable working with and evolving large software infrastructure such as build systems, testing frameworks, and managing library dependencies.
  • Very good understanding of different hardware architectures and their performance characteristics.
  • Experience debugging, profiling and optimising rendering code and profiling tools such as vtune, valgrind, perf, Nsight etc.
  • A positive, team-oriented, user-focused mindset.

Desirable Qualifications:

  • Knowledge of rendering research, physically based rendering and light transport algorithms.
  • Knowledge of shading engines and paradigms such as OSL/RSL/GLSL.
  • Experience in API design.
  • GPU programming expertise (CUDA or OpenCL) and experience with interactive rendering.
  • Experience in film or video game production.

At Wētā FX we celebrate our diversity and believe in creating an environment where all our crew feel welcomed, respected, supported and appreciated. We define ourselves by the quality of our work, and we’re striving to build a workplace experience that’s second to none. Here at Wētā FX we value open minds and encourage our crew to be themselves.

We aim to provide a discrimination-free experience, beginning from the moment you apply for a role with us. If there is anything we can do to make the recruitment process easier, please let us know at recruitment@wetafx.co.nz.

Location: Wellington, NZ

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