[Hiring] Software Engineer, Creative Workflows @Foundry

Role Description

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.

This role sits on engineering, but with a particular brief: be the artist's voice on the build side. Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you'll ship the things that make Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor feel like they understand artists:

• Custom nodes
• Custom widgets
• Reference workflows
• Example libraries
• Prototypes that turn "wouldn't it be cool if…" into something runnable today

More experienced engineers on the team will help harden your code where it matters; what you bring is the empathy and intuition the rest of the team learns from.

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

• Ship what artists actually need.
• Build the custom nodes, custom widgets, reference workflows, and example libraries that show what Griptape Nodes and Griptape Reactor can do for real production work. Imperfect-but-running beats theoretical-and-elegant — we'll iterate from there.
• Turn asks into things.
• Take requests, hypotheticals, and napkin sketches from artists and studios and turn them into working code — fast enough to keep momentum, clear enough that another engineer can pick it up and harden it.
• Be the artist in the code review.
• Participate in code reviews with the artist's experience as your lens. Flag the moments where the rest of engineering is about to ship something that will make a user stop, scroll, swear, or alt-tab away. That's the value you bring to those reviews.
• Pioneer new AI dev patterns.
• Show the team new ways to incorporate AI into how we build — agentic workflows, prompt patterns, evaluation loops. And dogfood the products: use Griptape Nodes inside our own dev processes, including agentic Nodes workflows we call as part of how we ship.
• Expand the team's empathy and intuition by example.
• Customer empathy and product intuition are skills the team is consciously building. You model what they look like in practice, and help everyone else get better at them.
• Hold the quality bar.
• Polish what ships externally, ship things artists actually use, and stay close to Customer Support when something hits friction in the field. Scrappy in the right places is fine; anything that breaks someone's flow is not.