Director, Core Engineering

About the role

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation. The Northern California studio has created some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Cars,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “WALL•E,” “Up,” “Toy Story 3,” “Brave,” “Inside Out,” and “Coco.” Its movies have won 35 Academy Awards® and have grossed more than $13 billion at the worldwide box office to date.

Responsibilities

• Leads a group of high-performing engineers to identify and deliver foundational technologies enabling novel and innovative tools and workflows

• Collaborates with the VP of Software R&D, Directors of Engineering, Engineering Team Leads, and key Production partners to help develop the vision and long-term strategy for the Tools group

• Interfaces and collaborates with industry partners regarding USD, Hydra, OpenExec and OpenSubdiv, delivering open-source technologies with industry-wide impact

• Led teams to plan and deliver against production driven roadmaps, both in quality and quantity, in a sustainable way, balancing priorities from a diverse set of stakeholders

• Collaborates with technical leads and project managers in Studio Tools, Systems, RenderMan and Production to align goals and priorities, identifying and negotiating cross-team dependencies, facilitating a cohesive, harmonious team dynamic

• Initiates, implements and evangelizes engineering practices to build high quality software in a sustainable way

• Directly manages a high performance group of team leads, providing technical oversight, promoting collaboration across teams and helping guide recruiting, personnel management and career development

• Buils a diverse, inclusive, fair, collaborative, and dynamic environment

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent

• 10+ years of industry experience (as an engineer or engineering lead)

• 5+ years of experience managing or leading a development team

• Strong working knowledge of modern software development methodologies and design patterns and experience leading significant software projects/products

• Demonstrated success building world class software

• Expertise in C++ and Python

• Practical knowledge of commercial software used in production and/or for software development

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills