Lead Render Wrangler

Why join Swaybox Studios?

Swaybox Studios is rewriting the rulebook of visual storytelling. As we collaborate with DC Studios/ Warner Bros Pictures Animation and Matt Reeves’ 6th and Idaho on a revolutionary new project, you’ll help bring bold creative visions to life through hands-on artistry and performance. This is your chance to be a part of a production that’s equal parts innovative and unforgettable.

Swaybox Studios is rewriting the rulebook of visual storytelling. As we collaborate with DC Studios/ Warner Bros Pictures Animation and Matt Reeves’ 6th and Idaho on a revolutionary new project, you’ll play a vital role in coordinating the artistry and logistics that bring bold visions to life. This is your chance to help lead a production that’s equal parts innovative and unforgettable.

Swaybox Studios is seeking a technically skilled and highly organized Lead Render Wrangler to join our VFX team and help establish, operate, and optimize our render farm for feature film production. This role will be instrumental in the initial setup and ongoing management of our rendering infrastructure, supporting a hybrid environment of dedicated render nodes, artist workstations, and cloud-based rendering resources.

The Lead Render Wrangler will work closely with Pipeline, IT, Supervisors, Technical Directors, and Production to ensure renders move efficiently through the farm, troubleshoot failed or stalled jobs, manage priorities, and identify potential capacity or infrastructure issues before they impact production.

In addition to the day-to-day operation of the render farm, this person will help develop render farm workflows, monitoring practices, documentation, and escalation procedures as the studio scales into full production. The ideal candidate is technically curious, calm under pressure, highly communicative, and comfortable working in a growing studio environment where systems and workflows are actively being developed.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced Render Wrangler or technically minded VFX professional who enjoys solving problems, improving workflows, and helping build a reliable rendering operation from the ground up.

Work Location: Onsite in New Orleans, LA

• Assist with the setup, configuration, testing, and rollout of the studio's render farm infrastructure in collaboration with Pipeline and IT.
• Lead the day-to-day operation and monitoring of the render farm, ensuring render jobs are processing efficiently and production priorities are being met.
• Monitor render queues, machine availability, worker health, job failures, storage usage, and overall farm utilization.
• Troubleshoot failed, stalled, or inefficient render jobs and identify whether issues originate from scenes, assets, software, licensing, hardware, plugins, or pipeline configuration.
• Work closely with artists and department leads to diagnose rendering issues and provide clear guidance on next steps.
• Coordinate render priorities with VFX Production, Supervisors, and department leads based on production schedules, reviews, and delivery deadlines.
• Help establish and maintain render farm policies, queue structures, priorities, resource allocation, and best practices.
• Support a hybrid rendering environment that may include dedicated CPU/GPU render nodes, artist workstations utilized during off-hours, and cloud-based rendering resources.
• Assist Pipeline and IT with testing new render hardware, software versions, plugins, licenses, and configurations before deployment into production.
• Monitor farm capacity and utilization trends and communicate potential bottlenecks or resource shortages to Production, Pipeline, and IT.
• Track and report useful render metrics, including render times, machine utilization, job failure rates, queue volume, and capacity requirements.
• Help identify unusually expensive or inefficient renders and work with artists and technical teams to determine potential optimizations.
• Support the integration and testing of cloud rendering and assist with determining when additional cloud capacity may be required to meet production demand.
• Help establish procedures…