Senior Games Pipeline Developer - Open Digital Asset (ODA)

Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Department: Development

Sony Pictures Imageworks is located on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. We are committed to respecting traditional lands, and working with communities towards reconciliation.

Sony Pictures Imageworks Canada Inc.

658 Homer Street., Suite 405, Vancouver, BC, V6B 2R4

Language in work environment - English

Benefits per company policy: include healthcare, tuition reimbursement, RRSP's, Sick and Vacation leave, standard increases as applicable

Role overview:

We’re looking for a Senior Pipeline / Tools Developer with strong games and engine experience to help design, build and implement the Open Digital Asset (ODA) platform — a framework for exchanging standardized, high-fidelity 3D assets across studios and pipelines.  

The ODA mission is to drastically reduce technical barriers and complexity in sharing 3D assets across the Sony Entertainment landscape, thereby unlocking creative collaboration and transmedia production opportunities. Following from an initial prototype and then establishing a low-friction asset exchange across Sony Entertainment, the program aims to promote adoption further across the wider industry. The Open Digital Asset project is built on the belief that harnessing universal standards for interchange and collaboration in digital media is instrumental for the industry as a whole.

This role sits at the intersection of USD architecture, real-world studio pipelines, game engines and open standards You’ll work closely with the Principal Engineer and partner directly with Sony Interactive Entertainment studios to ensure ODA provides concrete, near-term value for games teams. If you enjoy solving messy interoperability problems, care deeply about the benefit of standards, and want your work to make an impact on the industry at large, then this role is for you.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Design and implement USD-based tooling to package, validate, transform, and exchange production assets for use in and out of game engines
• Develop and refine workflows that support DCC -> ODA -> Engine -> ODA round-tripping while preserving structure, metadata, and artistic intent
• Work directly with real game production assets (characters, props, environments) to validate solutions under real-world constraints
• Build Python APIs, CLI tools, and engine-adjacent utilities that translate studio- and engine-specific representations into standardized ODA packages—and back again
• Partner with engine, tools, and tech-art teams to integrate ODA concepts into Unreal or proprietary engines with minimal disruption
• Contribute to technical documentation, specifications, and reference examples that make ODA understandable and adoptable by game teams
• Participate in design discussions around asset identity, provenance, versioning, metadata persistence, and cross-engine round-trip workflows
• Contribute to the evolution of ODA as an emerging open-source standard

Required Technical Experience & Skills:

• Extensive experience as a pipeline, tools, or engine-facing developer in games, VFX, or animation,  ideally 4 - 6+ years 
• Strong working knowledge of USD, including composition arcs, variants, layers, kinds, payloads, attributes semantics and scene graph structure
• Hands-on experience integrating assets with game engines (knowledge of Unreal is valuable)
• Advanced high performance language skills (eg. C++, Rust)
• Working Python development skills, including maintainable libraries and command-line toolingAbility to conduct design discussions, code reviews and quality analysis
• Practical experience with real-time asset constraints: LODs, memory budgets, engine metadata, and runtime-friendly structures
• Solid understanding of DCC pipelines (eg. Maya, Houdini, Blender) and how data moves between DCCs and engines/
• Experience with asset identity, versioning, packaging, and interchange across teams or studios
  Ability to debug, restructure, and reason about complex USD assets
  Strong judgment balancing technical correctness with usability for artists and tech artists

Preferred skills:

• Experience building or maintaining Unreal and/or game engine import/export pipelines
• Familiarity with MaterialX, USDShade, and real-time material translation challenges
• Experience preserving and round-tripping engine-specific metadata or custom schemas
• Background in outsourcing, co-development, or cross-studio asset sharing
• Experience with validation frameworks, automated QA, or schema-based checks for assets
• Exposure to open standards and industry initiatives (OpenUSD, AOUSD, ASWF)

The anticipated base salary for this position is $104,200 - 150,000/yr CAD. Benefits are per company policy: which include healthcare, tuition reimbursement, RRSP's, Sick and Vacation leave, standard increases as applicable. The actual base salary offered will depend on a variety of factors, including without limitation, the qualifications of the individual applicant for the position, years of relevant experience, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and if applicable, the location of the position.

We value unique perspectives, and want diverse, unique talent to work with us.  We encourage candidates from all identities to apply.