AI VFX Engineer

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.

• 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 new approaches with real shot data.
• Solve hard production problems: Tackle 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 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.

• 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/post‑vis, editorial handoff, and review (Shotgrid, Frame.io, or equivalent).
• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals (diffusion models, LoRA/fine‑tuning, Control Net‑style conditioning, prompt engineering, and evaluation metrics such as 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 Type Script. 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.

• Credits on major feature films or high‑profile episodic VFX (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…