Staff AI/ML Workflow Engineer – VFX & Virtual Production

The Walt Disney Company; Burbank (CA); On-site; USD 158,000 - 212,000; Full time

Job summary

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Staff Workflow Engineer AIML in Burbank, CA to design, prototype, and productionize next-generation workflows for filmmaking. You will bridge traditional pipeline engineering with ML, translating cutting-edge AI into scalable, secure production solutions and collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers.

You will report to the Director, Workflow Innovation and contribute across VFX pipelines, render farms, and hybrid cloud infrastructure in a fast-paced

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Visual Effects, Computer Graphics, or related field.
• 7+ years in production pipeline engineering, technical direction, or related VFX discipline.
• Deep expertise with Nuke in production environments.
• Experience with AI/ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Familiarity with GPU acceleration and render-farm workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, and deploy end-to-end workflows for VFX, post-production, and virtual production pipelines.
• Integrate DCC applications (Nuke, Maya, Houdini) into automated systems.
• Develop tools, APIs, and services to improve efficiency and cost.
• Create proof-of-concept environments to simulate production scenarios.
• Document standards and best practices for operational adoption.
• Evaluate and productionize AI/ML models for workflows.
• Build ML pipelines (training, fine-tuning, inference, optimization).
• Work with foundation models (vision, audio, multimodal) for production use.
• Optimize model performance for GPU environments and render farms.
• Collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to productionize models.
• Develop backend services in Python and related frameworks.
• Work with Docker, Kubernetes in containerized environments.
• Integrate GPU compute, render farms, and hybrid cloud/on-prem infrastructure.

Skills

Communication

Collaboration

Systems thinking

Creative problem-solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Visual Effects / Computer Graphics or related field

7+ years in production pipeline engineering / VFX

Tools

Nuke

Maya

Houdini

Python

Docker

Kubernetes

PyTorch

TensorFlow

FFmpeg

GStreamer

OpenColorIO

Job description

The Walt Disney Company is seeking a Staff Workflow Engineer AIML in Burbank, CA to design, prototype, and productionize next-generation workflows for filmmaking. You will bridge traditional pipeline engineering with ML, translating cutting-edge AI into scalable, secure production solutions and collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers.

You will report to the Director, Workflow Innovation and contribute across VFX pipelines, render farms, and hybrid cloud infrastructure in a fast-paced