Assistant Technical Director

Description

Lucasfilm Animation and creators of the Emmy award winning animation series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars”, are looking for an Assistant Technical Director to join their production of the highly successful animation series “Star Wars: Rebels.

The Assistant Technical Director is responsible for assisting pipeline engineering in the development of tools and support of an episodic animation pipeline. Daily tasks include ensuring automation systems are running and functioning properly, while simultaneously monitoring of job queues on the render farm. The Assistant Technical Director also serves as a first responder to support requests from production staff to ensure reliable communications between ongoing productions and animation technologies, and to assist the creative production staff on shows.

Responsibilities:
• Develop an understanding of episodic animation pipelines.
• Take direction from the Technical Supervisor concerning tasks and priorities.
• Maintain documentation of tools (API documentation, examples, etc), department work flow, ongoing tasks, and planned tasks.
• Participate in the planning stages of technical projects.
• Provide training and assistance to artists.
• Learn and follow coding conventions and standards.
• Assist with the management of all production-related data.

Education / Experience
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Experience and/or passion for software and tools that relate to a computer graphics environment.

Required Skills / Competencies
• Proficiency in Linux.
• Experience with CG production software (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc).
• Experience with rendering pipelines (MentalRay, Renderman, etc).
• Strong Python scripting required.
• Strong problem solving skills.
• Ability to communicate at both a technical and non-technical level with colleagues.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills required. Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to effectively interact with diverse personalities.
• Must be able to handle critique and (code) review.
• Proven ability to work autonomously and in team settings.

Preferred Skills / Competencies
• Experience with C/C++
• Experience with animated and/or episodic production pipelines.
• Experience with databases such as MongoDB, SQL, and PostgreSQL.
• Experience with web frameworks such as Flask and Django.
• Experience contributing to open source projects.
• Able to demonstrate strong planning abilities such whiteboarding, mind mapping, and flow charts.
• Understanding of other scripted languages such as Javascript and Shell (tcsh, bash, etc).