Software Engineer, Creative Workflows

The Role.

The next decade of film, episodic, and game production will be shaped by how well generative AI integrates into the pipelines artists already trust. Foundry's bet — backed by 30 years of building the tools behind every VFX Oscar of the last decade — is that the winners won't be standalone AI apps. They'll be the studios that can compose, control, and reason over a fleet of AI models inside their existing workflows, with the security and traceability production demands.

Griptape Nodes is the orchestration layer that makes that possible: a Python-first, node-based platform where artists assemble pipelines spanning image, video, 3D, audio, and text models — running locally or in the cloud, model-agnostic, and stitched into Nuke, Maya, Blender, and beyond. Griptape Reactor is what comes next: a context layer that gives agents real production awareness so AI work can finally be coherent across an entire production.

This role sits on engineering, but with a particular brief: be the artist's voice on the build side. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you'll ship the things that make Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor feel like they understand artists — custom nodes, custom widgets, reference workflows, example libraries, prototypes that turn "wouldn't it be cool if…" into something runnable today. More experienced engineers on the team will help harden your code where it matters; what you bring is the empathy and intuition the rest of the team learns from.

Our North Star is "Craveability." We build products people crave to use, not have to use. We measure success by how much users enjoy our products, not just tolerate them. Engineering is held to that bar — we keep users in flow, test the way they actually work, and build with the polish that earns trust.

The Responsibilities.

• Ship what artists actually need. Build the custom nodes, custom widgets, reference workflows, and example libraries that show what Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor can do for real production work. Imperfect-but-running beats theoretical-and-elegant — we'll iterate from there.

• Turn asks into things. Take requests, hypotheticals, and napkin sketches from artists and studios and turn them into working code — fast enough to keep momentum, clear enough that another engineer can pick it up and harden it.

• Be the artist in the code review. Participate in code reviews with the artist's experience as your lens. Flag the moments where the rest of engineering is about to ship something that will make a user stop, scroll, swear, or alt-tab away. That's the value you bring to those reviews.

• Pioneer new AI dev patterns. Show the team new ways to incorporate AI into how we build — agentic workflows, prompt patterns, evaluation loops. And dogfood the products: use Griptape Nodes inside our own dev processes, including agentic Nodes workflows we call as part of how we ship.

• Expand the team's empathy and intuition by example. Customer empathy and product intuition are skills the team is consciously building. You model what they look like in practice, and help everyone else get better at them.

• Hold the quality bar. Polish what ships externally, ship things artists actually use, and stay close to Customer Support when something hits friction in the field. Scrappy in the right places is fine; anything that breaks someone's flow is not.

The Requirements.

The essentials:

• A real background in creative production — film/TV VFX, animation, games, motion design, advertising, virtual production, or adjacent. You've shipped things artists actually used.
• Confident Python. Comfortable designing and building features end-to-end. You ship things that work, even when they'd benefit from a refactor, and you partner well with engineers who'll bring polish where it matters.
• Fluency in at least one major DCC ecosystem — Nuke, Maya, Houdini, Blender, Unreal, After Effects, or equivalent — including its scripting layer (Python, MEL, MaxScript, etc.).
• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals — diffusion models, LLMs and agents, prompt engineering, evaluation. Enough to use these tools well and improve them, not necessarily train them.
• A track record of using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, agent frameworks) to accelerate your own work, plus a knack for spotting new patterns others on the team can adopt.
• Empathy and intuition for artist workflows that you can articulate, not just feel. You can explain why something will break flow before it ships.
• Comfort working alongside engineers who are deeper on the CS side, and bringing them along on what artists actually need.

Nice to have, keen to learn:

• Shipped credits in film, episodic, games, or commercials — a credit list is welcome.
• Background as a TD, technical animator, technical artist, pipeline TD, technical designer, or creative technologist.
• Experience building tools, custom nodes, or pipeline extensions inside a studio environment.
• Familiarity with media formats — OpenEXR, USD, ACES, OpenColorIO, EDL/AAF/OTIO, common containers and codecs.
• A side practice — creative coding, generative art, shader work, agentic experiments — that signals curiosity beyond the day job.
• Public-facing chops: published workflows, tutorials, conference talks, or a presence in the creative-tech community.
• A degree in computer science.

Job Benefits

• Health Savings Account & 401K Plan
• Medical, Dental and Vision plans
• Bonus scheme
• Anniversary day off
• Passion Days
• Annual personal learning & development time

THE COMPANY.

Foundry has a 30-year heritage in developing creative software for the Media and Entertainment industry. Its portfolio of award-winning products solves complex visualization challenges to turn incredible ideas into reality.

Working with creative leaders around the globe, Foundry products are used to create breathtaking visual effects and animation and have been integral in the making of every VFX Academy Award-winning film since 2007.

For more information visit www.foundry.com.

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