Data Pipeline Technical Director (TD) / Data Lead Software Engineer

Lytro, Mountain View, CA

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About Lytro

Lytro is revolutionizing high-end content creation for Virtual Reality and Cinema with the world’s first professional Light Field solutions. We are backed by top-tier VCs including Andreessen-Horowitz, Greylock Partners, NEA, and North Bridge Venture Partners and have built a world-class team and dynamic culture driven by innovation and collaboration.

About Lytro Immerge:

Lytro Immerge is the world’s first professional Light Field solution for Virtual Reality.

From our novel multi-camera rig/array capture system to our rendering, post production tools, and playback environment, Lytro Immerge provides content creators the ability to achieve lifelike presence through capturing the world in six degrees of freedom (6DoF).

The system captures live action video for virtual reality with true stereo, parallax and realistic lighting offering viewers more freedom of movement, superior image quality, and ultimately a much more immersive experience.

About The Opportunity:

The Rendering Ops team is looking for its first Data Pipeline Technical Director (TD), who will be an integral part of the team focused developing the systems that allow our internal platforms to scale for the needs of our Cloud, Engineering, Systems, and Post Production teams.

With your expertise with various workflows and scaling technical systems, you will have a huge impact into the future growth of Lytro’s new product developments as well as current Post Production processes.

The Render Operations team is involved in all aspects of the content creation, data processing, cloud operations, systems infrastructure, providing good exposure to all aspects of Lytro’s technical operations with good opportunities for growth and specialization.

The focus of this role is to create the automation tools and processes, to make it easier for the rest of the Rendering Ops team, to finish their tasks in an efficient and timely manner.

If you love to experiment, prototype, and create custom VR pipeline solutions, this is the role for you!

Main Responsibilities:

Develop cross platform tools and scripts for managing large-scale data workflows across ZFS, NFS, SMB, Gluster storage applications with a variety of platforms involving RAIDed, SSD, spinning disk and object store.
Help build the pipeline and integrate custom software into the rendering pipeline.
Testing and debugging of the render and data pipeline tools and processes to ensure stability and usability
Collaborate closely with the Render Supervisor, VFX Sups, engineers, systems admins and end users to determine the best solutions for project stakeholders
Create and update thorough documentation of all development as necessary.
Perform ongoing research to recommend continuous improvements to our processes and workflows
Mentor colleagues on rendering and data workflows and best practices.
Help anticipate and build our systems for flexibility and scale to meet the resource needs of our customers, both internal and external.

Required Skills & Experience:

Advanced python and shell scripting skills.
Can rapidly prototype features and modules to demonstrate proofs of concept.
Bachelor's degree in computer science or software engineering and a minimum of 4 years experience developing and maintaining storage systems in a production context.
Very high degree of comfort with multiple *nix distro environments, or 2 years Linux or Unix sysadmin experience
A thorough understanding of the entire visual effects process including on-set capture, DI, compositing and rendering
Detail orientation and a strong ability to multi-task
A familiar understanding of storage, networking and performance issues that arise with automated tools
Complete knowledge of up-to-date Storage Technology/IT methods, practices, and trends
Excellent communication skills. Lytro's environment is highly collaborative and you'll have the opportunity to express your ideas to executives, engineers, and external customers to help shape our roadmap.

Bonus Points:

C++ coding experience developing tools and/or plugins
Experience integrating and transitioning new tools and workflows in a production environment; ie: Maya to Katana, or Nim to Shotgun, or Arnold to Renderman.
ELK stack, Zenoss, Prometheus or other monitoring stacks are a plus
Studio experience is a HUGE plus!

About Lytro

At Lytro, we believe that Light Field will continue to shape the course of Virtual and Augmented Reality, and we’re incredibly proud of the role we’ve been able to play in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We’ve uncovered challenges we never dreamed of and made breakthroughs at a seemingly impossible pace. We’ve had some spectacular successes, and built entire systems that no one thought possible. More importantly, we built a team that was singularly unified in its focus and unrivaled in its dedication. It has been an honor and a pleasure to contribute to the cinema and Virtual Reality communities, but starting today we will not be taking on new productions or providing professional services as we prepare to wind down the company. We’re excited to see what new opportunities the future brings for the Lytro team as we go our separate ways. We would like to thank the various communities that have supported us and hope that our paths will cross in the future. Lytro was founded in 2006 by Executive Chairman Ren Ng, whose Ph.D. research on Light Field imaging won Stanford University’s prize for best thesis in computer science. In late 2015, Lytro announced the world's first Light Field solution for Virtual Reality (VR), Lytro Immerge, that was quickly followed by the 2016 launch of Lytro Cinema, the world's first Light Field capture system for cinematic content. With these products, Lytro pioneered the generational shift from legacy 2D imaging to 3D volumetric video.