Senior Software Engineer, Graphics/USD

The Role

This role is an exciting opportunity for a developer with significant commercial experience. You'll be an overall influence on the team you are part of without explicit line management. You'll have developed good awareness of the SDLC, working as a second pair of eyes and ears to the engineer leading your team. This includes contributing to design/architectural discussions, in addition to using your domain experience in the relevant areas to interact with customers to help troubleshoot/solve their problems.

You'll work on bug fixes and new features as part of one of our Agile teams. This will combine significant contributions to the task breakdown and estimation both for your own tasks and those of your team, drawing on your experience and knowledge of technology and existing libraries and components. As a senior member of the team, you'll act as a mentor to those less experienced on the team for both technical input and pastoral care; from time to time you may be asked to take the lead on specific areas of functionality with those colleagues. As part of this work, input to architectural design, documentation and education is expected.

As a senior member of the team, you’ll dig deeper into the problems you’re trying to solve, clarifying assumptions and exploring solutions outside of the immediate. You’ll facilitate others to do the same, modelling an attitude to learning that inspires others to seek feedback and development opportunities, supporting those opportunities where you can.

As the team works on several projects, feeding into multiple products, your ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with colleagues in other teams is key to the role.

The Team

This team is responsible for rendering - with a caveat that Foundry aren’t involved in creating an “offline render” - extending through to 3D workflows across the portfolio.

Our FoundryGL layer to allow OpenGL on MacOS lives with this team, but beyond that this team is responsible for 3D visualisation across the portfolio - you should be able to get the same result across the product line - through Hydra delegates. As such, they are also involved in enabling offline rendering - through other avenues - through the same mechanism. Future looking work will consider the part Vulkan and Metal play in Foundry’s rendering technology.

As MaterialX becomes more aligned with USD, this team will lead the efforts in developing technologies to adopt MaterialX across the portfolio, overlapping with product teams where prudent.

The long term strategy of the USD shim - again with the goal of reuse - lies with this team across the product line. USD is the future backbone of 3D in Foundry products, and we expect USD visualisation and workflow to align significantly with this team.

As part of our hybrid working policy, you will be working twice a week in our office.

Job requirements

Experience

• Degree in Engineering/Computer Science (or equivalent experience)
• Commercial Experience (> 5 years) underpinned by best practises (e.g. BDD, TDD, Code Review)
• Technical mentorship within a team to guide towards agreed solutions and designs as well as acting as an ambassador for the values of the team.
• Demonstrable contribution towards planning, task breakdown and estimation, proposing solutions for designs and issues taking technical leadership on implementation.
• Customer interaction to debug, or advise on best practice.

Skills

• Cross-platform development across at least two of macOS, Linux and Windows.
• Excellent knowledge of C++, knowledge of Python beneficial
• Good interpersonal skills, coupled with good written and verbal communication skills.
• Significant experience of realtime graphics (mainly OpenGL), including optimisation, debugging, and shader authoring. Metal/Vulkan experience advantageous
• Excellent 3D graphics skills, including advanced 3D maths and low level knowledge of the hardware to understand optimal memory use (e.g. texture atlasing)
• Working familiarity with open source components like USD, Hydra, and MaterialX.

Job responsibilities

• Assist in the design, implementation and documentation of complex software features, through authoring, reviewing, and bug fixing code.
• Investigates feature level issues and impediments to sprint work and proposes solutions that move work forward.
• Significant contribution to work breakdown, creating precise engineering requirements through collaboration with product management and other engineers.
• Understand, practice and refine our development process within the team
• Take responsibility for complex project areas and support less experienced developers, mentoring and educating where appropriate.
• Improve the quality and stability of the product with maintenance bug fixes, and using domain appropriate design practices that emphasise reusability, testability, extensibility and maintainability.
• Contribute to project planning by providing effort estimates for the team’s future work
• Assist our Customer Support team with investigations and suggestions related to issues reported by users

Job benefits

• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• Pension scheme & life assurance
• Health cash plan & medical insurance
• Season ticket loan
• Company’s social events
• Gym Discounts
• Personal Annual Development Time
• Passion Days
• Anniversary Day off

THE COMPANY.

Foundry has a heritage of more than 25 years, 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 for the past decade.

For more information visit www.foundry.com.

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We know that creating an inclusive environment that values and encourages different perspectives is critical for our success, and the success of our people. We are learning, listening and taking action to be better and foster trust in our community. Our goal is to ensure every person working at Foundry feels safe and free to be themselves, to share their ideas or concerns and that there is equal access to opportunities for all.