Staff Engineer: Contextual Storage & Metadata

Pixar Animation Studios Inc.; Emeryville (CA); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 237,000; Full time

Job summary

Pixar Animation Studios Inc. is seeking a Staff Engineer to architect a storage metadata and context layer for AI-enabled asset management. You will shape APIs and MCP implementations to let AI agents navigate Petabytes of media. The role bridges storage, tooling, and creative teams in a hybrid Emeryville environment.

You will drive semantic discovery, contextual reasoning, and on-call readiness while aligning data with evolving creative workflows and agentic architectures.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software-driven infrastructure in scale environments.
• Experience bridging data center storage and AI agent workflows.
• Proven API/middleware development between storage and app layers.
• Knowledge of MCP and tool-calling interfaces for LLMs.
• Design schemas and indexing pipelines for semantic representations of files.
• Ability to translate creative needs into metadata queries.
• Comfort across multiple programming languages, especially Python.

Responsibilities

• Architect semantic connectivity exposing NAS environments to AI agents and LLMs.
• Lead MCP server implementations for safe, efficient data browsing by models.
• Design semantic discovery systems for long-path hierarchies and file headers.
• Bridge storage teams, tooling designers, and artists to deliver workflow enhancements.
• Manage state and relationships between raw data and metadata reflections.

Skills

Full-Stack Storage

API & Middleware

MCP & AI Tooling

Metadata Engineering

Backend Development

Translator Mindset

HPC & Storage Knowledge

Python Proficiency

Modern AI Frameworks

Tools

Kafka

ElasticSearch

Vector DBs

REST

gRPC

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Pixar Animation Studios Inc. is seeking a Staff Engineer to architect a storage metadata and context layer for AI-enabled asset management. You will shape APIs and MCP implementations to let AI agents navigate Petabytes of media. The role bridges storage, tooling, and creative teams in a hybrid Emeryville environment.

You will drive semantic discovery, contextual reasoning, and on-call readiness while aligning data with evolving creative workflows and agentic architectures.