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Motion R&D - Pipeline Technical Director

The opportunity

WētāFX is the standard-bearer for creativity and innovation in visual effects and animation, attracting talent, partners, and clients that seek to push what is possible in pursuit of their artistic vision. Along the way, our ground-breaking work has earned six visual effects Academy Awards®, 12 Academy Sci-Tech Awards and six visual effects BAFTA Awards in addition to the 34 Visual Effects Society Awards awarded to us by our peers. Based in Wellington, New Zealand, we are best known for our work on The Lord of the Rings, Avatar and the Planet of the Apes franchise. We've recently finished work on a number of projects including the second season of Netflix's Umbrella Academy, Mulan and Zack Snyder's Justice League.

The Motion R&D department at Unity/Weta Digital, which consists of Pipeline TDs and Software Developers, is responsible for creating, maintaining and supporting the tools/pipeline used by the Motion departments at WētāFX: Animation, Motion Editing, Facial Motion, Crowds, and Previs. Our role is to enhance the capabilities of these departments.

What you’ll be doing

• Learn and familiarise yourself with our vast codebase (a mixture of legacy and new) by helping our artists on the Support queue and reducing support by hot-fixing and lodging issues to our development backlog.
• Help provide timely support for active productions and maintain Motion R&D codebase/tools
• Work with adjacent R&D departments to troubleshoot/triage show-critical issues
• Work alongside the Pipeline, Engineering, Rendering and Research departments.
• Enable and empower artists to achieve their best results. As a champion for root-cause analysis and critical thinking, you will be working with artists directly to solve their pipeline and workflow issues in our core support team for Motion at WētāFX.

What we’re looking for

• Significant experience with Python and Autodesk Maya - including scripting and programming plugins
• Git version control systems.
• Self-motivated, approachable, proactive, adaptable, and a hard-working teammate with collaborative dev experience
• Experienced in providing technical assistance to deliver projects with internal/external clients. Able to thrive in fast-paced/time-critical environments. Able to collect requirements and user feedback independently
• An excellent communicator – both written and verbal. You’ll work with developers, non-technical people, and leadership to understand feature requests and solve production problems.

You might also have

• Familiarity with unit/integration testing, and strong experience with JIRA/project management systems
• Qt (including PyQt/PySide), C/C++ experience
• Experience working at a VFX/AAA Game Studio, and familiarity with any of these: Animation, Motion Capture, Facial, and Crowd pipelines.

Life at Unity

Unity (NYSE: U) is the world’s leading platform for creating and operating real-time 3D (RT3D) content. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and others, use Unity to make their imaginations come to life. Unity is the foundation upon which the world’s most powerful digital content is created. Specifically, Unity’s platform provides a comprehensive set of software solutions to create, run and monetize interactive, real-time 2D and 3D content for mobile phones, tablets, PCs, consoles, and augmented and virtual reality devices.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, Unity had, on average, 3.9 billion monthly active end users who consumed content created or operated with its solutions. The applications developed by these creators were downloaded, on average, five billion times per month in 2021. For more information, please visit www.unity.com.

Unity is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law. If there are preparations or accommodations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Unity does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Unity will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Unity.

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