Staff AI VFX Engineer

Title: Staff AI VFX Engineer

Location: Culver City, California, United States of America

•  Seattle, Washington, United States of America
•  San Francisco, California, United States of America
•  San Jose, California, United States of America

Job Description:

The Opportunity

As AI rapidly transforms creative industries, professional production workflows must evolve alongside it. At Firefly Foundry, we're leading an industry-first initiative to define how generative AI integrates into high-end visual effects for feature films and episodic content. A major franchise holder doesn't get a generic model; they get a model that knows their characters, environments, and visual style, integrated directly into production-grade tools.

Generative AI has limited practical application in VFX pipelines with real world production challenges. The true breakthrough will come from achieving production-grade quality, deeply integrating with existing DCC tools, and establishing AI as a new, fully realized field within visual effects. That's exactly what we're building. At Foundry, we approach this work with a deep respect for the artistry and craft of VFX. Our mission is grounded in empowering artists while ensuring the responsible and commercially safe use of AI in production environments.

We're looking for pioneers who want to help define what AI-driven VFX looks like at the highest level. You'll work directly with studios, VFX houses, and creative leadership to take Foundry from pilot to production-scale deployment.

What You'll Do

• Build and validate AI-driven VFX workflows: Design end-to-end pipelines that integrate Foundry's custom-trained diffusion and video models into compositing, look-dev, previs, and virtual production. You'll write working prototypes, not slide decks to prove out new approaches with real shot data.

• Solve hard production problems: Tackle the issues that block adoption: temporal coherence across shot sequences, maintaining art-directable control over generated elements, matching on-set lighting and lens characteristics, and hitting the fidelity bar that supervisors demand.

• Own the integration surface: Define how Foundry models plug into Nuke, Houdini, Maya, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Substance 3D. Design the APIs, node graphs, and plugin architectures that make AI-generated assets first-class citizens in existing pipelines, including USD/OpenEXR/ACES-compliant outputs.

• Shape the product from the production floor: Translate what you learn from studio engagements into concrete product requirements for the Firefly and Foundry engineering teams. You're the bridge between what a VFX supervisor needs at 2 AM during a color session and what our model architecture can deliver.

• Implement and prototype multi-modal model orchestration: Foundry doesn't ship a single model. It ships a coordinated stack of image, video, animation, and 3D generation models that need to work together. You'll design the orchestration layer: how a character generated in the image model maintains identity when animated by the video model; how texture maps generated for Substance 3D stay consistent with hero shots generated in the image pipeline; how style transfer models constrain the output space to a franchise's visual language across all modalities.

• Engage studio and VFX leadership: Present to CTOs, VFX supervisors, and heads of production. Run technical deep-dives and creative workshops. You'll need to be as credible talking to a Nuke compositor as you are in a boardroom with studio executives.

• Codify repeatable playbooks: Document reference architectures, prompt engineering strategies for VFX use cases, quality evaluation pipelines, and deployment patterns so the next studio engagement doesn't start from scratch.

Required

• 5 - 10+ years in VFX engineering, pipeline TD, or tools development with shipped credits in film, episodic, or AAA gaming.

• Deep fluency in production VFX workflows: compositing (Nuke), 3D (Maya/Houdini), rendering, look-dev, previs/postvis, editorial handoff, and review (Shotgrid, Frame.io, or equivalent).

• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals e.g. diffusion models, LoRA/fine-tuning, ControlNet-style conditioning, prompt engineering, and evaluation metrics (FID, CLIP, perceptual loss). You don't need to have trained a model from scratch, but you need to understand what's happening under the hood well enough to debug workflow failures.

• Proficiency in Python and at least one of C++, Rust, or TypeScript. Comfortable writing production-quality code, not just scripts.

• Familiarity with VFX data standards: OpenEXR, ACES, USD, Alembic, OpenColorIO.

• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical studio leadership. Strong written communication, you can write a clear 1-pager or technical design doc.

Preferred

• Credits on major feature films or high-profile episodic VFX (think tentpole-scale, not just indie shorts).

• Experience with real-time rendering (Unreal Engine, virtual production stages, LED volumes).

• Hands-on experience fine-tuning or deploying generative models (Stable Diffusion, Runway, ComfyUI, or similar).

• Background in computer vision or image processing (optical flow, segmentation, depth estimation, upscaling).

• Prior experience in a customer-facing technical role (solutions engineer, field CTO, technical account lead).

Who You'll Work With

Firefly Foundry Applied Scientists, product engineers, VFX and M&E Solutions Engineers, Adobe product teams across Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Substance 3D, and Frame.io, plus Customer Success, Security/Privacy/Legal, and Partner/Alliances. Externally, you'll be embedded with studio technical leadership, VFX supervisors, and pipeline teams.

Logistics

• Location: Hybrid/Remote flexible.

• Travel: ~10-15% to studios, post houses, production locations, and industry events (SIGGRAPH, NAB, VES, etc.).

Why This Role

• You'll be defining a category, not iterating on an existing product. Custom-trained generative AI for VFX production doesn't have a playbook yet. You're writing it.

• Adobe's creative tool ecosystem (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Substance 3D, Frame.io) gives Foundry a distribution and integration advantage that no pure-play AI startup can match.

• You'll work directly with major studios and franchise holders on IP that you'll actually see on screen.

• You'll have a direct line from field reality to product roadmap, the kind of influence that senior engineers at most companies never get.

#FireflyGenAI

About Adobe

Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe's industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.

Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We're on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.

Let's Adobe together

At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.

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AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:

Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.

At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI - and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it's restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.

Expected Pay Range:

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several  U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $172,500 -- $306,625 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.

In California, the pay range for this position is $211,800 - $306,625 In Washington, the pay range for this position is $201,000 - $291,150

At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).

In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.

State-Specific Notices:

California:

Fair Chance Ordinances

Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and "fair chance" ordinances.

Colorado:

Application Window Notice

There is no deadline to apply to this job posting because Adobe accepts applications for this role on an ongoing basis. The posting will remain open based on hiring needs and position availability.

Massachusetts:

Massachusetts Legal Notice

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.