Position Overview
We are seeking an engineer who thrives at the intersection of research, open-source innovation, and production workflows. This role focuses on rapidly transforming novel research ideas, experimental algorithms, and emerging open-source technologies into practical tools, plugins, and prototypes that can be used in real-world creative and production environments.
The ideal candidate is a builder and problem-solver and someone comfortable navigating ambiguity, quickly validating technical feasibility, and creating functional prototypes that help teams decide what should evolve into scalable products.
This role acts as a bridge between research teams, applied innovation groups, artists, and pipeline engineering accelerating the path from concept to production-ready solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Translate novel research, experimental techniques, and open-source tools into functional prototypes and working demonstrations.
Rapidly develop plugins, scripts, and lightweight tools for evaluation within production environments and creative software.
Integrate experimental solutions into existing pipelines through wrappers, connectors, or proof-of-concept implementations.
Evaluate emerging technologies by building targeted prototypes that validate feasibility, performance, and usability.
Collaborate with research, engineering, and artist teams to interpret requirements and refine technical solutions.
Design and implement structured testing workflows to assess new tools against real production scenarios.
Gather feedback from artists and stakeholders to iterate quickly on prototypes.
Maintain awareness of relevant research publications, open-source developments, and emerging industry tools.
Document prototypes, workflows, and evaluation outcomes to support decision-making and future productization.
Help implement data preparation and validation pipelines for multi-view and video datasets, including synchronization, metadata handling, and quality checks.
Required Qualifications
Strong software engineering background with experience in rapid prototyping.
Proficiency in Python and C++.
Strong experience with computer vision and machine learning architectures.
Experience with 3D Gaussian Splatting, NeRFs, or other radiance-field-based methods, including training and evaluation.
Practical experience training or fine-tuning video diffusion or related generative models on custom datasets.
Hands-on experience with multi-view camera calibration.
Ability to quickly understand and implement research concepts.
Familiarity with open-source ecosystems and collaborative development practices.
Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
Ability to make pragmatic trade-offs between cutting-edge research and what9s feasible on production timelines.
Preferred Qualifications
Passion for movies, TV, and storytelling.
Familiarity with VFX/animation data formats and pipeline technologies (USD, OpenEXR, OCIO, etc.)
Experience building plugins or extensions for creative VFX software including real-time engines (e.g., Houdini, Nuke, Unreal Engine).
Location: Vancouver
