Sr R&D Software Engineer

General Summary: 
The Sr R&D Software Engineer will research and develop new systems, optimize, and update existing platforms and applications related to core engineering practices. As part of the Core Technology team at LAIKA, the Sr R&D Software Engineer will solve a range of complex, mission critical, and creative problems within a unique and exciting niche of the Media and Entertainment industry. The Sr R&D Software Engineer will help shape the next generation of our production technology and directly influence the technical pipeline behind LAIKA’s storytelling. 

Job Function:  

• Participate in early discussions on the ground floor of new or emerging technology within the film, animation, and VFX production pipelines. 
• Work with the Core Technology team to build early proof of concepts with emerging technology through to prototypes and pilot-phase development platforms or solutions.
• Write tools and leverage open source to automate tasks with an emphasis on employing strong principles for code quality and maintainability.
• Explore and research the various ML frameworks for ethically-trained multimodal strategy to improve the pre-production efficiency and accelerate the development velocity.
• Collaborate with the database developers on best practices relating to schema design and database use. 
• Design and develop tools and technical solutions for production and technology infrastructure that improve flexibility and control for users. 
• Design systems for other software engineers to standardize core elements of our technology platform to improve quality control for new software. 
• Design and build prototypes in collaboration with the project team, with iterative feedback from key stakeholders for next generation systems. 
• Design easy-to-use APIs and interfaces for both ML experts and non-experts; offer expertise in the development and establishment of core tools and APIs in the areas of application dependency mapping, software unit testing frameworks, build and release systems, enterprise messaging, automated deployment, and cloud storage interfaces. 
• Maintain a solid understanding of parallel programming, multithreading, as well as scene graph and data flow representations and algorithms. 

Qualifications:  

• 7+ years of applied software development or engineering experience in a professional setting. Experience with SDLC concepts and methodologies, including CI/CD, version control discipline.
• 2-5 years of experience in ML engineering on production systems dealing with training or inference of deep learning models.  
• Expertise in Python, GO, or C++, required. Proficiency in Java Script, jQuery, Bootstrap, PHP, and Laravel Framework.
• Solid understanding of database design, implementation, and troubleshooting, required. Familiarity with data modelling, data mining in SQL, SQLK, Postgres, MongoDB and Kafka, a plus. 
• Experience developing and operating services on container platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes, preferred. 
• Solid general programming skills including knowledge of software patterns, build systems, and methods for coding high-performance applications.
• Experience with popular optimized LLM serving libraries such as DeepSpeed, TensorRT, or vLLM, Hugging Face Transformers and TGI.
• Experience with LLM Ops tooling, LLM Agent APIs, and LLM orchestration frameworks and libraries such as LangChain.  
• Design and implement tooling around the productization of generative foundation models such as RAG, version control, and prompt management.  
• Experience designing a Super Knowledge Graph and subgraphs for MAM usage.
• Familiarity with modern computer graphics, OpenGL, Metal and GPU technologies is critical.  

Physical Demands and Work Environment 
The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.  

• Physical demands: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is required to walk; stand; sit; use hands to operate standard office equipment; reach with hands and arms; balance; stoop; talk or hear both in person and by telephone. The employee must lift and/or move up to 15 pounds. Vision abilities include close vision, distance vision, and the ability to adjust focus. 
• Work environment: While performing the duties of this job, the employee works under typical office conditions and is exposed to variable indoor temperatures. The noise level is usually quiet or moderate.   

Location 
On-site in Hillsboro, OR and also eligible for remote work. 

Salary 
Salary is commensurate with skills and experience.

Disclaimer
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this classification. They are not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of personnel so classified.

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