Software Engineer, Tools Internals; Core

Our Software R&D department (Tools) is responsible for developing Pixar’s in-house and open-source software. We work very closely with both artists and engineers to build innovative filmmaking tools that enable our film production and continuously extend artistic reach.

As a Software Engineer on the Internals team, you will work on extending the feature set as well as improving the performance of our in-memory scene representation and its computation engine. This software stack is at the heart of our in-house digital content creation application, Presto, and is making its way into open-source USD. You will collaborate with us in a multi-functional team of developers, and help craft and implement robust, easy-to-maintain code.

Are you enthusiastic about software architecture and API design? Do you love writing high-performance and high-quality C++ code, and are you interested in putting your multithreading and parallel programming skills to use? If so, we would love to have you on the team!

• Contribute to world-class 3D graphics software applications and frameworks that enable and support Pixar’s film production
• Profile performance-critical code paths and creatively optimize algorithms to enhance interactive user experiences
• Take ownership of challenges that arise from evolving and modifying software that is heavily exercised in an active production environment
• Collaborate with a team of engineers, technical artists, QA, build support and project management
• Work closely with other teams to plan and develop user-facing features that help our artists push boundaries, as well as libraries and APIs that enhance the capabilities of our software
• Join forces with valued external partners, and help bring Pixar’s production-proven technologies to our open-source USD distribution
• Work in a collaborative environment, exchanging knowledge with accomplished technicians, and drawing inspiration from amazing artists

• A strong and continually-expanding understanding of C++, including knowledge of how things work under the hood
• Solid knowledge of data structures and algorithms
• Experience with STL and modern C++
• Passion in crafting high-quality code with attention to detail, readability and performance in mind
• Ability to design and implement APIs and frameworks as well as user-facing features
• You hold yourself to a high bar when it comes to engineering methodologies, like writing maintainable code, providing good documentation and embracing automated testing
• Love of the whole development cycle:
  From proposal and planning, to implementation, testing, optimization and deployment
• You listen well and communicate clearly and succinctly
• Four or more years of professional experience

• Prior exposure to performance profiling tools and workflows, parallel programming and multithreading, and cache-aware programming
• Experience programming on GNU/Linux
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience or education

The hiring range for this position in Emeryville is $ to $ per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.