Every great creative project needs a spark—and we’re the team that collaborates to support and organize the digital media behind the magic. As our data scales, we want to close a growing context gap between our technical storage hierarchies and the natural language of our creative teams.
As a Staff Engineer at the intersection of Data Platforms and AI, you will architect the software layers that enable our production-facing storage to become context-aware. Your mission is to design the APIs, Metadata services, and MCP implementations that allow AI agents to navigate and reason across Petabytes of high-value media assets. You will help to bridge the gap between traditional HPC protocols and a modern Agentic ecosystem.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Architect Semantic Connectivity: Develop and maintain the software layer that exposes existing NAS environments (NFS, SMB, S3) to AI agents and LLM frameworks through modern API abstractions and MCPs
- Implement Model Context Protocol (MCP): Lead the implementation of MCP servers to provide a standardized interface for AI models to safely and efficiently browse, read, and interpret data within our HPC storage
- Semantic Discovery & Agentic Connectivity: Design automated systems to deconstruct the implicit context stored in long-path hierarchies and file headers, architecting the "connective tissue" (REST, gRPC, MCP) that enables AI agents to resolve complex creative queries without needing direct knowledge of underlying mount paths or protocols
- Cross-Disciplinary Collaborator: Act as a critical "bridge" across technical storage teams, software tool designers, and creative artists—adapting your communication style to translate deeply technical concepts into practical, workflow-enhancing solutions for non-technical users
- Data & Metadata Orchestration: Manage the state and relationship between raw file data and its digital twin in the metadata layer, ensuring that relational and semantic data remain in sync as the studio library evolves
- Context Feature Enablement: Enable "smart" features within existing storage such as auto-tagging, similarity search, and automated summarizing
- On-call: Ability to participate in an on-call rotation for critical issues
QUALIFICATIONS:
- Full-Stack Storage Expertise: Ability to bridge the gap between the data center and the AI agent. You leverage your background in architecting, managing, and troubleshooting physical and/or virtual storage solutions to inform how agentic workflows and metadata pipelines access underlying data at petabyte scale
- Broad Protocol Knowledge: Expertise in how data is accessed and managed across NFS, SMB, and S3. You understand the nuances of file-locking, permissions, and latency across different storage protocols
- API & Middleware Development: Proven experience building APIs (REST, gRPC) and middleware that sit between raw storage and application layers
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) & AI Tooling: Understanding of MCP and how to build tool-calling interfaces for LLMs
- Metadata Engineering: Proven ability to design schemas and indexing pipelines using Kafka, ElasticSearch, or Vector DBs to represent physical files as semantic entities
- 3+ Years of Software-Driven Infrastructure: Recent experience in scale environments where you've transitioned manual workflows into programmatic, API-driven services
- The Translator Mindset: Ability to translate abstract creative needs (e.g., "I need to see all iterations of this scene") into technical metadata queries that return precise results
- Versatile Backend Development: High degree of comfort working across various programming languages to build the foundational "glue" that connects storage metrics and file data to agentic frameworks; deep proficiency in Python is a significant plus
PREFERRED SKILLS:
- Modern AI Frameworks: Hands-on experience with agentic libraries, with a focus on building custom data connectors and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures
- Containerization & Orchestration: Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for scaling metadata extraction and embedding workers
- HPC Awareness: Understanding of the performance characteristics of high-end storage (Vast, NetApp, StorageGrid, AWS) and how to minimize the overhead of metadata operations
- Creative Pipeline Interest: A passion for digital content creation and an interest in how AI can accelerate and modernize production workflows
The hiring range for this position in Emeryville is $182,835.00 to $236,610.00 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.
Pixar is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We know our storytelling is at its best when we include, celebrate and embrace difference. We strive to be a diverse workforce that is representative of our audiences, and where all can thrive and belong. We are committed to building a team that includes and respects a variety of voices, identities, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. Pixar participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S.
