Director, AI VFX Engineering

Role summary   

Lead Firefly Foundry’s GenAI Field Architecture practice, with a focus on VFX, building and managing a team of senior VFX engineers and architects proficient in Generative AI. Drive executive engagement with studio, streaming, sports, and gaming leaders while scaling Firefly adoption through people leadership, multi-functional alignment, and repeatable execution models.   

You’ll partner with VFX houses, studios, directors, and more in the film industry to reinvent content pipelines with Firefly – taking initiatives from pilot to global rollout. You will be collaborating with Firefly, and Foundry AI and engineering teams, designing and deploying groundbreaking new VFX workflows and technologies.   

What you’ll do   

• Build & lead a team: Hire, develop, and mentor a high-performing group of VFX engineers and workflow experts. 

• Executive engagement: Represent Firefly Foundry with the media and entertainment leaders; guide your team to deliver executive design reviews, workshops, and thought leadership.  

• Codify best practices: Establish and evolve reference patterns for creative workflow blueprints, prompt/evaluation pipelines, campaign scalability, and governance guardrails.  

• Support complex problem-solving: Provide leadership and escalation frameworks as your team tackles fidelity, throughput, quality, and authenticity of new VFX workflows with Generative AI.  

• Integration strategy: Oversee enterprise integration across Adobe surfaces apps (Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Substance 3D, Frame.io), and DAM/MAM systems; empower your team to lead implementations.  

• Ecosystem leadership: Direct partners and customers’ blueprint creation in terms of how to work with our new workflows and technologies, validate delivery against our standards, and scale.  

• Drive measurable value: Ensure your team translates creative and business priorities into ROI/TCO metrics that influence customer expansions.  

What you’ll bring   

Must-have   

• 12+ years of developing and shipping VFX solutions in film and other M&E industries (e.g., gaming) 

• 2+ years developing and working with Generative AI solutions (e.g., ComfyUI) for VFX, production, and post-production (in animation, or live action).  

• 5+ years in people leadership roles, managing VFX engineering teams (direct reports, hiring, coaching, career development).  

• Deep understanding of M&E production, post-production, and VFX workflows. 

• Familiarity in Generative AI solution patterns: prompt design & evaluation, guardrails, observability/measurement, vectorized retrieval, style constraints, and cost governance.  

• Strong technical depth across Software and tooling for VFX; ability to evaluate trade-offs without being the primary implementer.  

• Executive presence with studio leadership; exceptional written communication (1-pagers, decision records, reference designs).  

Nice-to-have   

• Portfolio of contributions to A-list movies, or other productions.   

Collaboration   

Partner daily with Firefly Foundry Applied Scientists, Foundry VFX and M&E solutions engineers, Adobe product groups (Firefly/Express/Photoshop/Premiere/After Effects/Frame.io), Customer Success, Security/Privacy/Legal, and Partner/Alliances teams.   

Work setup   

• Travel: ~10% for workshops, studio/post visits, and key industry events.   

• Hybrid/Remote: flexible.   

#FireflyGenAI