About the role
Company Description
Rodeo FX is a high-end creative company offering services in visual effects, advertising, animation, and experiential. Recognized as one of Montreal’s Top Employers and recipient of the 2022 Mercuriades Employer of the Year award, the independent, Oscar-winning company employs close to 800 artists across studios in Montreal, Québec City, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Paris.
The company is a creative partner to major studios and platforms, including Netflix, HBO, Disney, Marvel, Amazon Studios, Warner Bros., and Sony, with work on notable projects such as Stranger Things, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Dune: Prophecy, Silo, and Sonic 3.
Work Arrangements
As an artist-founded and artist-led company, the culture centers on providing freedom, resources, and a supportive environment. Due to the requirement for team leadership, decision-making, and operational support, this role is expected to work from the studio at least four days per week.
Role Summary
Rodeo FX is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to build and operate the technical platform supporting the VFX pipeline. The core mission is to reduce the cost and risk of change, enabling the studio to adopt new tool versions quickly, maintain environment consistency, and reconfigure the production pipeline without disruption. The role sits at the intersection of development and operations, focusing on making complex systems dependable, reproducible, and easy to evolve.
Main Responsibilities
Platform Currency & Software Lifecycle
- Build and own systems and processes to keep the VFX software platform current by tracking, testing, and rolling out new versions of DCCs, plugins, libraries, and internal tools.
- Reduce the cost and risk of upgrades, including OS and dependency migrations, to ensure rapid and safe software adoption with clear rollback paths.
- Establish repeatable validation and release workflows to ensure platform changes reach artists reliably with minimal manual effort.
Containerization & Configurable Pipeline
- Containerize pipeline software and services to ensure environments are portable, reproducible, and isolated from host-level drift.
- Design a configurable production pipeline to allow adjustment of environments, tool versions, and workflows per show, per site, or per team without bespoke rebuilds.
- Advance infrastructure-as-code and declarative configuration to maintain platform nimbleness.
Package & Dependency Management (Rez)
- Maintain and extend the Rez package ecosystem, including package definitions, resolution rules, release processes, and environment configuration.
- Partner with pipeline developers to ensure software and dependency releases are fast, predictable, and safe to roll back.
- Improve build, packaging, and distribution tooling to ensure new tool and library versions reach artists reliably.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of software, platform, DevOps, or pipeline engineering experience, ideally in VFX, animation, gaming, or a comparable production-technology environment.
- Strong Linux systems knowledge, including experience with enterprise distributions (RHEL / Rocky / CentOS) and managing software upgrades or environment migrations at scale.
- Hands-on experience with containerization (Docker, Podman, or similar) and reproducible environment/build tooling.
- Strong Python skills with solid software engineering practices (version control, testing, code review, packaging).
- Experience with dependency and environment management; Rez experience is a strong asset, though equivalent systems are relevant.
- Solid grasp of CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code, with a proven track record of making change safe and repeatable.
- Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills for working across creative, technical, and operations teams.
Preferred Assets
- Familiarity with a VFX pipeline and DCCs (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Katana, or similar).
- Familiarity with VFX production tracking systems (Flow Production Tracking, FTrack, AYON, or similar).
- Experience contributing to open-source pipeline tooling (e.g., Rez or other Academy Software Foundation projects).
Additional Information
- Full-time, Permanent Contract.
- 5 paid sick/personal days.
- 2 additional statutory holidays in the winter.
- Group Insurance, access to Dialogue online support, and an Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
- RRSP with employer contribution.
- Discounts on public transport, spas, sports classes, art centers, cafes, furniture, and local businesses.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Rodeo FX is committed to creating an inclusive, equitable workplace where different perspectives are embraced.
Recruitment Process Note
Rodeo FX may use AI-based tools for tasks such as interview transcription or preliminary application analysis. These tools do not replace human decision-making, and all final hiring decisions are made by the recruitment team and hiring managers.