Lead Render Wrangler — Render Farm Lead

Swayboxstudios; New Orleans (LA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Swaybox Studios seeks a Lead Render Wrangler to establish, operate, and optimize our render farm for feature production. You’ll partner with Pipeline, IT, Supervisors, and TDs to ensure timely renders and scalable infrastructure in a hybrid environment.

You will mentor other Wranglers, develop workflows, monitor queues and capacity, and troubleshoot issues across Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and Unreal Engine while driving efficiency and reliability in a growing studio.

Qualifications

• Previous experience in a lead or senior Render Wrangler position in VFX, animation, feature film, or similar CG production.
• Experience mentoring or overseeing other Render Wranglers.
• Strong understanding of CG rendering workflows and production pipelines.
• Experience with render farm management or queue management systems (Deadline/OpenCue/Qube!/Tractor).
• Familiarity with Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Unreal Engine, or similar production software.
• Experience with cloud render management and hybrid render environments.

Responsibilities

• Set up, configure, and rollout render farm infrastructure with Pipeline and IT.
• Lead day-to-day render farm operations and monitor efficiency and priorities.
• Monitor queues, machine health, job failures, storage, and farm utilization.
• Troubleshoot failed or stalled renders and diagnose scene, asset, software, licensing, or pipeline issues.
• Collaborate with artists and leads to diagnose rendering problems and guide next steps.
• Coordinate render priorities with VFX Production and department leads per schedules.
• Help establish render farm policies, queues, priorities, and resource allocation.
• Support hybrid environments including on-prem and cloud rendering resources when needed.
• Assist with testing new hardware, software, plugins, licenses before deployment.
• Track render metrics and report capacity and bottlenecks to Production, Pipeline, IT.
• Identify expensive or inefficient renders and work with teams to optimize.
• Develop procedures for cloud rendering integration and capacity planning.
• Maintain clear documentation of workflows and troubleshooting steps.
• Create handoff processes and document outstanding issues.
• Mentor and guide additional Render Wranglers as team grows.
• Collaboration with Pipeline and Production to improve submission, monitoring, and resource-management workflows.

Skills

Lead Render Wrangler

Render Farm Management

Deadline

OpenCue

Qube!

Tractor

Cloud Rendering

Pipeline Support

Hybrid Render Environment

Windows/Linux

Documentation

Mentoring

Tools

Deadline Monitor

Deadline Client

Deadline Workers

Job description

Swaybox Studios seeks a Lead Render Wrangler to establish, operate, and optimize our render farm for feature production. You’ll partner with Pipeline, IT, Supervisors, and TDs to ensure timely renders and scalable infrastructure in a hybrid environment.

You will mentor other Wranglers, develop workflows, monitor queues and capacity, and troubleshoot issues across Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and Unreal Engine while driving efficiency and reliability in a growing studio.