Lead Render Wrangler - VFX Render Farm Lead

SWAYBOX STUDIOS®; New Orleans (LA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Swaybox Studios is seeking a technically skilled and highly organized Lead Render Wrangler to join our VFX team and help establish, operate, and optimize our render farm for feature film production.

This role will be instrumental in the initial setup and ongoing management of our rendering infrastructure, supporting a hybrid environment of dedicated render nodes, artist workstations, and cloud-based rendering resources.

Qualifications

• Experience as a lead or senior Render Wrangler in a high-volume CG production environment.
• Experience mentoring or supervising other Render Wranglers.
• Strong understanding of CG rendering workflows and pipelines.
• Familiarity with render farm management systems (Deadline/OpenCue/Qube!/Tractor).
• Experience troubleshooting render jobs and reading render logs.
• Experience with Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Unreal or similar software.
• Experience with cloud render management and hybrid environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to guide technical and non-technical teammates.

Responsibilities

• Setup, configure, test, and roll out render farm infrastructure with Pipeline and IT.
• Lead day-to-day render farm operations and monitor production priorities.
• Monitor queues, machine health, storage usage, and farm utilization.
• Troubleshoot failed or stalled renders and identify root causes.
• Collaborate with artists and leads to diagnose rendering issues and next steps.
• Coordinate render priorities with Production, Supervisors, and leads.
• Develop render farm policies, queue structures, and resource allocation.
• Support hybrid rendering including cloud resources and on-premises hardware.
• Test new hardware/software/plugins before production deployment.
• Track render metrics and report capacity needs; optimize renders and costs.
• Document workflows, troubleshooting steps, and escalation procedures.
• Train and mentor additional Render Wranglers as the team grows.
• Improve submission, monitoring, reporting, and resource-management workflows.

Skills

Lead experience

Mentoring

Render wrangling

CG rendering workflows

Cloud rendering

Deadline

OpenCue

Qube!

Tractor

Python scripting

Communication

Problem solving

Tools

Deadline

OpenCue

Qube!

Tractor

Job description

Swaybox Studios is seeking a technically skilled and highly organized Lead Render Wrangler to join our VFX team and help establish, operate, and optimize our render farm for feature film production.

This role will be instrumental in the initial setup and ongoing management of our rendering infrastructure, supporting a hybrid environment of dedicated render nodes, artist workstations, and cloud-based rendering resources.