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Full Time Job

Software Engineer, Tools Usd

Pixar

Emeryville, CA 05-09-2025
 
  • Paid
  • Full Time
  • Entry (0-2 years) Experience
Job Description
Software Engineer, Tools USD (Core)

Are you interested in advancing Pixar's in-house and open-source filmmaking software? Our Software R&D department is looking for a motivated and skilled engineer to help push the boundaries of our Universal Scene Description (USD) project. Our engineering team works with both artists and engineers to build innovative filmmaking tools that enable our film production and continuously extend artistic reach.
As a Software Engineer on the USD team, you will work on USD, our framework for asset interchange and collaborative editing, and a cornerstone of our filmmaking pipeline. This codebase has been open sourced as OpenUSD, and you'll support and collaborate with a rich community across various industries to extend the project in exciting new directions!
What you'll do:
• Contribute to Universal Scene Description (USD), an open-source software framework for asset interchange and collaborative editing that forms the backbone of Pixar's filmmaking pipeline, and is used widely across various industries
• Further integrate USD into Pixar's custom toolset of 3D content creation applications, and help evolve its growing feature set while improving performance and scalability
• Take ownership of challenging problems that arise from evolving the architecture of software that is heavily exercised in an active production environment
• Collaborate with artists and other engineers to provide innovative technical solutions that extend our artistic and engineering reach
• Join forces with external partners as USD continues to redefine pipelines across industries, bringing new contributors and collaborators to the table
What you offer:
• A strong understanding of C++ that you continually expand upon
• Solid knowledge of data structures and algorithms
• Readiness to navigate a large code base with many active contributors
• Creative problem solving skills, with attention to detail, and a desire to discover and address root causes
• Pride and passion in building software architecture that minimizes complexity, scales well, and remains malleable to an ever evolving filmmaking pipeline
• You hold yourself to a high bar when it comes to engineering methodologies, like writing maintainable code, providing good documentation and embracing automated testing
• Love of the whole development cycle: From proposal and planning, to implementation, testing, optimization and deployment
• You listen well and communicate clearly and succinctly
The hiring range for this position in Emeryville is $160,565.00 to $207,790.00 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-74v5op-18-97-14-90-42 in your application.

Salary Details
Salary Range: $160,565 to $207,790 Per Year ($ USD)
Company Profile
Pixar

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renoinswned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation.