Staff Engineer: Context-Aware Storage & Metadata

The Walt Disney Company; Emeryville (CA); On-site; USD 183,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Pixar Animation Studios seeks a Staff Engineer to bridge storage systems and AI workflows. You will design APIs, metadata services, and MCP implementations to let AI agents navigate petabytes of media at scale, with a focus on context-aware storage for production.

You’ll work across REST, gRPC, and MCP, collaborating with storage, software tools, and creative teams to convert complex creative needs into precise metadata queries and scalable pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bridge data center and AI agent workflows for metadata pipelines.
• Expertise in NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols and related storage concerns.
• APIs (REST, gRPC) and middleware between storage and apps.
• Understanding of MCP and tooling for LLMs.
• Design schemas and indexing with Kafka, ElasticSearch, or Vector DBs.
• 3+ years in software-driven infrastructure and scale environments.
• Translate abstract creative needs into metadata queries.
• Backend development across languages; Python is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Architect Semantic Connectivity: expose NAS (NFS/SMB/S3) to AI agents via MCPs and APIs.
• Implement Model Context Protocol servers for safe data browsing by models.
• Design automated systems to interpret long-path hierarchies and headers.
• Bridge storage teams, tool designers and artists to enable workflows.
• Manage metadata for raw data and its digital twin across the library.
• Enable smart features like auto-tagging and similarity search.
• Participate in on-call rotation for critical issues.

Skills

Full-Stack Storage

Protocol Knowledge

APIs & Middleware

MCP & AI Tooling

Metadata Engineering

Software-Driven Infra

Translator Mindset

Python Proficiency

Tools

Kafka

ElasticSearch

Vector DBs

Docker

Kubernetes

REST

gRPC

Job description

Pixar Animation Studios seeks a Staff Engineer to bridge storage systems and AI workflows. You will design APIs, metadata services, and MCP implementations to let AI agents navigate petabytes of media at scale, with a focus on context-aware storage for production.

You’ll work across REST, gRPC, and MCP, collaborating with storage, software tools, and creative teams to convert complex creative needs into precise metadata queries and scalable pipelines.