Senior Software Engineer - Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor

Foundry • ,

10d

About The Position

The next decade of film, episodic, and game production will be shaped by how well generative AI integrates into the pipelines artists already trust. Foundry's bet — backed by 30 years of building the tools behind every VFX Oscar of the last decade — is that the winners won't be standalone AI apps. They'll be the studios that can compose, control, and reason over a fleet of AI models inside their existing workflows, with the security and traceability production demands.

Griptape Nodes is the orchestration layer that makes that possible: a Python-first, node-based platform where artists assemble pipelines spanning image, video, 3D, audio, and text models — running locally or in the cloud, model-agnostic, and stitched into Nuke, Maya, Blender, and beyond. Griptape Reactor is what comes next: a context layer that gives agents real production awareness so AI work can finally be coherent across an entire production.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you'll keep building that substrate. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you'll work across Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor — extending the integrations, the model orchestration, and the production-grade plumbing that turns "interesting AI demo" into "shipped in a finalled shot."

Our North Star is "Craveability." We build products people crave to use, not have to use. We measure success by how much users enjoy our products, not just tolerate them. Engineering is held to that bar — we keep users in flow, test the way they actually work, and build with the polish that earns trust.

Requirements

• 5+ years of commercial software development, shipping production-grade systems against real deadlines.
• Strong Python. Comfortable owning non-trivial systems end-to-end — design, implementation, testing, and the boring-but-critical bits like observability, error handling, and deployment.
• Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals — diffusion models, LLMs and agents, fine-tuning, MCP, evaluation metrics, prompt engineering. You don't need to have trained a foundation model, but you need to know enough to debug a workflow when it goes sideways.
• Familiarity with media and entertainment workflows and the formats that hold them together — OpenEXR, USD, ACES, OpenColorIO, EDL/AAF/OTIO, common video containers and codecs.
• A track record of using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, agent frameworks) to genuinely accelerate your work, not as a novelty.
• Strong written communication. You can write a clear design doc, a useful PR description, and a code comment that future-you will thank past-you for.
• Comfort working across Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Nice To Haves

• Experience integrating with DCC tools (Nuke, Maya, Houdini, Blender) — plugins, scripting layers, or pipeline tools.
• C++ chops for the places Griptape touches lower-level rendering or compositing code.
• Background in node graph systems, dataflow architectures, or visual programming environments.
• Hands-on experience with model serving or agent orchestration frameworks.
• Prior work inside a VFX, animation, episodic, or game studio.
• Experience with on-prem deployment, render-farm integration, or production management systems (ShotGrid/Ayon/Flow Production Tracking, etc.).

Responsibilities

• Expand the orchestration runtime. Build on the node graph engine, model adapters, and execution layer at the heart of Griptape Nodes. Make multi-model pipelines reliable, repeatable, and fast — on a workstation, on-prem, or in the cloud.
• Build on Griptape Reactor. Extend the services, APIs, and integrations that connect production context to agents and Griptape Nodes workflows.
• Integrate AI models as first-class citizens. Wire image, video, 3D, animation, and audio models into pipelines artists can actually trust. Care about temporal coherence, identity preservation across modalities, and art-directable control — not just sample quality.
• Plug Griptape into the DCCs. Work on the bridges into Nuke, Maya, Blender, Hydra, and other industry tools, including USD, OpenEXR, ACES, and OpenColorIO handling so AI-generated assets behave correctly in real pipelines.
• Make AI part of how we build. Use Claude, Cursor, Griptape Nodes itself, and whatever else clears the path — and bring the team along with you. The expectation is more velocity and a higher quality bar because of AI, not a trade-off.
• Hold the quality bar. Design, implement, test, and document features for the way studios actually work — testing whole workflows, not isolated functions, and chasing the polish that keeps artists in flow and out of troubleshooting tab. Review code thoughtfully, estimate honestly, and partner with Customer Support when issues surface from the field.
• Build empathy and intuition for the artist. Studios will tell us things the roadmap can't predict. Spend time with the people who use these tools, develop a feel for how they actually work, and help the team get better at building the right thing the first time, with fewer iterations.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed