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Character Td Jobs (NOW HIRING)

You'll design the orchestration layer: how a character generated in the image model maintains ... Required * 5 - 10+ years in VFX engineering, pipeline TD, or tools development with shipped credits ...

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Character Td information

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$10

$19

$37

How much do character td jobs pay per hour?

As of Aug 21, 2026, the average hourly pay for character td in the United States is $19.08, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $13.46 and $24.28 per hour, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a Character TD?

Character TDs, or Character Technical Directors, are professionals in animation, film, and video game industries responsible for creating and maintaining character rigs. They develop the technical frameworks that allow animators to manipulate 3D character models, ensuring characters move naturally and expressively. Character TDs blend artistic understanding with technical skills in scripting, rigging, and simulation to support the animation pipeline. Their work is essential for efficient and believable character animation in productions.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Character TD?

To thrive as a Character TD (Technical Director), you need a solid understanding of character rigging, anatomy, and 3D animation principles, often supported by a degree in computer graphics or a related field. Proficiency with software like Maya, Python scripting, and industry-standard rigging tools is crucial for building and maintaining complex character rigs. Strong problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills help you work effectively with animators and other departments. These abilities ensure high-quality, efficient character workflows that support creative vision and technical requirements in animation or VFX pipelines.

What are some common challenges Character TDs face when collaborating with animators and modelers?

Character TDs often serve as a bridge between the modeling and animation teams, ensuring that character rigs are both technically robust and animator-friendly. Challenges can arise from balancing the artistic vision of modelers with the practical needs of animators, such as creating rigs that are flexible yet stable and easy to use. Effective communication and iterative feedback are crucial, as Character TDs frequently need to adjust rigs based on animator input or adapt to last-minute design changes. Building strong relationships with both teams helps streamline workflows and leads to better end results.

What is the difference between Character Td vs Costume Designer?

AspectCharacter TdCostume Designer
Required CredentialsRelevant certifications in costume design, theater, or related fieldsSimilar certifications in fashion or costume design
Work EnvironmentTheater, film, television productionsFilm, television, theater, fashion industry
Employer & Industry UsageProduction companies, theaters, studiosProduction houses, fashion houses, theaters
Common Search & ComparisonCharacter Td vs Costume Designer

Character Td and Costume Designer roles both involve costume creation for performances, but Character Td typically focuses on the technical and costume coordination aspects, while Costume Designers are responsible for the overall design and conceptualization of costumes. Both roles require similar credentials and work in related environments, often within the entertainment industry.

More about Character Td jobs
Infographic showing various Character Td job openings in the United States as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 95% Full Time, and 5% Part Time. Highlights an 99% Physical, and 1% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $39,680 per year, or $19.1 per hour.

Staff AI VFX Engineer

Adobe Systems

Los Angeles, CA • On-site

Other

This job post has expired today. Applications are no longer accepted.


Adobe rating

8.9

Company rating: 8.9 out of 10

Based on 10 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

39th of 245 rated software companies


Job description

The Opportunity
As AI rapidly transforms creative industries, professional production workflows must evolve alongside it. At Firefly Foundry, we're leading an industry-first initiative to define how generative AI integrates into high-end visual effects for feature films and episodic content. A major franchise holder doesn't get a generic model; they get a model that knows their characters, environments, and visual style, integrated directly into production-grade tools.
Generative AI has limited practical application in VFX pipelines with real world production challenges. The true breakthrough will come from achieving production-grade quality, deeply integrating with existing DCC tools, and establishing AI as a new, fully realized field within visual effects. That's exactly what we're building. At Firefly Foundry, we approach this work with a deep respect for the artistry and craft of VFX. Our mission is grounded in empowering artists while ensuring the responsible and commercially safe use of AI in production environments.
We're looking for pioneers who want to help define what AI-driven VFX looks like at the highest level. You'll work directly with studios, VFX houses, and creative leadership to take Firefly Foundry from pilot to production-scale deployment.
What You'll Do
  • Build and validate AI-driven VFX workflows: Design end-to-end pipelines that integrate Firefly Foundry's custom-trained diffusion and video models into compositing, look-dev, previs, and virtual production. You'll write working prototypes, not slide decks to prove out new approaches with real shot data.

  • Solve hard production problems: Tackle the issues that block adoption: temporal coherence across shot sequences, maintaining art-directable control over generated elements, matching on-set lighting and lens characteristics, and hitting the fidelity bar that supervisors demand.

  • Own the integration surface: Define how Firefly Foundry models plug into Nuke, Houdini, Maya, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Substance 3D. Design the APIs, node graphs, and plugin architectures that make AI-generated assets first-class citizens in existing pipelines, including USD/OpenEXR/ACES-compliant outputs.

  • Shape the product from the production floor: Translate what you learn from studio engagements into concrete product requirements for the Firefly and Firefly Foundry engineering teams. You're the bridge between what a VFX supervisor needs at 2 AM during a color session and what our model architecture can deliver.

  • Implement and prototype multi-modal model orchestration: FireflyFoundry doesn't ship a single model. It ships a coordinated stack of image, video, animation, and 3D generation models that need to work together. You'll design the orchestration layer: how a character generated in the image model maintains identity when animated by the video model; how texture maps generated for Substance 3D stay consistent with hero shots generated in the image pipeline; how style transfer models constrain the output space to a franchise's visual language across all modalities.

  • Engage studio and VFX leadership: Present to CTOs, VFX supervisors, and heads of production. Run technical deep-dives and creative workshops. You'll need to be as credible talking to a Nuke compositor as you are in a boardroom with studio executives.

  • Codify repeatable playbooks: Document reference architectures, prompt engineering strategies for VFX use cases, quality evaluation pipelines, and deployment patterns so the next studio engagement doesn't start from scratch.

Required
  • 5 - 10+ years in VFX engineering, pipeline TD, or tools development with shipped credits in film, episodic, or AAA gaming.

  • Deep fluency in production VFX workflows: compositing (Nuke), 3D (Maya/Houdini), rendering, look-dev, previs/postvis, editorial handoff, and review (Shotgrid, Frame.io, or equivalent).

  • Working knowledge of generative AI fundamentals e.g. diffusion models, LoRA/fine-tuning, ControlNet-style conditioning, prompt engineering, and evaluation metrics (FID, CLIP, perceptual loss). You don't need to have trained a model from scratch, but you need to understand what's happening under the hood well enough to debug workflow failures.

  • Proficiency in Python and at least one of C++, Rust, or TypeScript. Comfortable writing production-quality code, not just scripts.

  • Familiarity with VFX data standards: OpenEXR, ACES, USD, Alembic, OpenColorIO.

  • Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical studio leadership. Strong written communication, you can write a clear 1-pager or technical design doc.

Preferred
  • Credits on major feature films or high-profile episodic VFX (think tentpole-scale, not just indie shorts).

  • Experience with real-time rendering (Unreal Engine, virtual production stages, LED volumes).

  • Hands-on experience fine-tuning or deploying generative models (Stable Diffusion, Runway, ComfyUI, or similar).

  • Background in computer vision or image processing (optical flow, segmentation, depth estimation, upscaling).

  • Prior experience in a customer-facing technical role (solutions engineer, field CTO, technical account lead).

Who You'll Work With
Firefly Foundry Applied Scientists, product engineers, VFX and M&E Solutions Engineers, Adobe product teams across Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Substance 3D, and Frame.io, plus Customer Success, Security/Privacy/Legal, and Partner/Alliances. Externally, you'll be embedded with studio technical leadership, VFX supervisors, and pipeline teams.
Logistics
  • Location: Hybrid/Remote flexible.

  • Travel: ~10-15% to studios, post houses, production locations, and industry events (SIGGRAPH, NAB, VES, etc.).

Why This Role
  • You'll be defining a category, not iterating on an existing product. Custom-trained generative AI for VFX production doesn't have a playbook yet. You're writing it.

  • Adobe's creative tool ecosystem (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Substance 3D, Frame.io) gives Firefly Foundry a distribution and integration advantage that no pure-play AI startup can match.

  • You'll work directly with major studios and franchise holders on IP that you'll actually see on screen.
  • You'll have a direct line from field reality to product roadmap, the kind of influence that senior engineers at most companies never get.

#FireflyGenAI
About Adobe
Adobe empowers everyone to create through innovative platforms and tools that unleash creativity, productivity and personalized customer experiences. Adobe's industry-leading offerings including Adobe Acrobat Studio, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Experience Manager, and GenStudio enable people and businesses to turn ideas into impact, powered by AI and driven by human ingenuity.
Our 30,000+ employees worldwide are creating the future and raising the bar as we drive the next decade of growth. We're on a mission to hire the very best and believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. At Adobe, we believe that great ideas can come from anywhere in the organization. The next big idea could be yours.
Let's Adobe together
At Adobe, we believe in creating a company culture where all employees are empowered to make an impact. Learn more about Adobe life, including our values and culture, focus on people, purpose and community, Adobe for All, comprehensive benefits programs, the stories we tell, the customers we serve, and how you can help us advance our mission of empowering everyone to create.
Adobe is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. Learn more.
Adobe aims to make our Careers website and recruiting process accessible to any and all users. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation to navigate our website or complete the application process, email or call +1 .
AI Use Guidelines for Interviews:
Our interviews are designed to reflect your own skills and thinking. The use of AI or recording tools during live interviews is not permitted unless explicitly invited by the interviewer or approved in advance as part of a reasonable accommodation. If these tools are used inappropriately or in a way that misrepresents your work, your application may not move forward in the process.
At Adobe, we empower employees to innovate with AI - and we look for candidates eager to do the same. As part of the hiring experience, we provide clear guidance on where AI is encouraged during the process and where it's restricted during live interviews. See how we think about AI in the hiring experience.
Expected Pay Range:
Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several U.S. geographic markets, and we pay differently based on those defined markets. The U.S. pay range for this position is $172,500 -- $306,625 annually. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for the job location during the hiring process.
In California, the pay range for this position is $211,800 - $306,625In Washington, the pay range for this position is $201,000 - $291,150
At Adobe, for sales roles starting salaries are expressed as total target compensation (TTC = base + commission), and short-term incentives are in the form of sales commission plans. Non-sales roles starting salaries are expressed as base salary and short-term incentives are in the form of the Annual Incentive Plan (AIP).
In addition, certain roles may be eligible for long-term incentives in the form of a new hire equity award.
State-Specific Notices:
California:
Fair Chance Ordinances
Adobe will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment in accordance with state and local laws and "fair chance" ordinances.
Colorado:
Application Window Notice
There is no deadline to apply to this job posting because Adobe accepts applications for this role on an ongoing basis. The posting will remain open based on hiring needs and position availability.
Massachusetts:
Massachusetts Legal Notice
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

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About Adobe

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Adobe for All is our vision to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across our company and in our communities. We’re focused on creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce; unleashing the full potential of every employee; and driving meaningful impact for Adobe, our industry, and society at large. Creativity has the power to unite us and inspire us to change the world. Through a vision we call Creativity for All, we’re empowering millions of people of all ages and backgrounds to express themselves, reach their full potential, and share their diverse perspectives with the world. We’re committed to advancing the responsible use of technology and driving a positive environmental impact through sustainability and climate action. Our innovations are making a significant impact across AI ethics, security, privacy, trust and safety, accessibility, and sustainability.

Industry

Computer and computer peripheral equipment and software wholesalers

Company size

10,000+ Employees

Headquarters location

San Jose, CA, US

Year founded

1982