Render Technical Director

About the role

Flying Bark Productions is seeking a Render Technical Director to bridge creative departments and the render infrastructure, optimizing high‑density production scenes for quality and cost efficiency.

Key responsibilities

• Audit and profile production scenes, checking geometry, textures, shading networks and scene graph efficiency before farm dispatch.
• Diagnose and resolve complex render failures across surfacing, FX and lighting, including memory crashes, render locks and visual artifacts.
• Adjust sampling, ray depths and light thresholds to meet frame budgets while preserving image quality.
• Profile CPU, I/O and memory usage, using engine logs and profilers to isolate bottlenecks.
• Develop and maintain internal tools and scripts in Python and Lua for render pass setups, custom AOVs and automated denoising.
• Optionally write or modify custom shaders in OSL or C++ to support specialized ray‑tracing needs.

Required profile

• Minimum 6 years experience as a Render TD, Lighting TD or Pipeline TD in feature animation or VFX.
• Deep knowledge of production ray‑tracers such as Renderman, Arnold or Karma.
• Proficiency with DCC tools including Katana and Nuke and strong understanding of scene graph structures.
• Hands‑on experience reading render logs, identifying memory leaks and using profilers.
• Solid foundation in computer graphics principles – Monte Carlo sampling, BVH acceleration, ACES/OCIO colour management and system resource limits.

Required skills

• Python
• Lua
• OSL
• C++
• Renderman
• Arnold
• Karma
• Katana
• Nuke
• Pixar Tractor (queue management)
• ACES/OCIO colour pipelines

What we offer

• Industry‑leading studio space with cinema, Zen garden, games room and state‑of‑the‑art animation facilities.
• Daily breakfast, cake days, movie nights, wrap parties and a culture club.
• Hybrid work model with flexible work‑from‑home days.
• Career development, training and mental‑health resources including free counselling.
• Discounted health insurance, superannuation benefits and charitable initiatives.