SUMMARY

Staff software engineer with 20+ years in VFX pipeline development, working in Go and Python. Currently building AI platform infrastructure: MCP gateways, LLM gateways and coding agent tooling. A background in film production and compositing gives a close view of what artists and production need from their tools. Seeking to build impactful developer and production tooling on collaborative engineering teams.

SKILLS

Languages:

Go (cgo), Python, C++, Cython

Technologies:

AI/LLM: MCP servers/gateways, LiteLLM, Bifrost, AWS Bedrock, Ollama, coding agents
Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, OpenTelemetry
Platforms: Linux (primary), macOS, Windows
Messaging and APIs: NATS JetStream, gRPC, Protobuf, JSON
Auth and config: OAuth/OIDC, Okta, CUE
CI/CD and build: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, GitOps, Waf
GUI and imaging: Qt, PySide/PyQt, OpenImageIO, ImageMagick, Maya/Nuke APIs

EXPERIENCE

Wētā FX, Wellington, New Zealand - Staff Engineer

JAN 2013 - PRESENT (Pipeline Engineer 2013-2017, Senior Software Engineer 2017-2025, Staff Engineer 2025-PRESENT)

Built the MCP gateway (Go): embeds Bifrost and MCP Go SDK to aggregate stdio/HTTP MCP servers behind one endpoint for Claude Code, JetBrains and other agents, with non-interactive auth
Created wairouter, a client-side launcher for coding agent harnesses (Claude Code, opencode, Kilo Code, Pi) adding multi-endpoint support, accurate LiteLLM billing and budgets, tool-output compression, cache detection, error enrichment and notifications
Helped deploy and maintain the studio's LiteLLM gateway; evaluated LiteLLM, Bifrost and agentgateway
Delivered GitOps workflows exposing self-service deployment triggers to developers
Author of wauth, the central auth library (OAuth/OIDC token caching) that multiple internal services and tools are built on, including Go Jira/Confluence MCP servers
Designed cueconfig, a CUE-based hierarchical config with Python/C++ bindings, used by two groups
Wrote plow-ai-assist, a Go CLI that uses a local LLM to diagnose why render jobs are not running
Co-developed the in-house render farm and pipeline services for asset management, review, scene description and multi-site sync, with on-prem and AWS cloud deployment
Developed a Python/C++ clang-based code generation compiler and the environment management and dependency resolving system
Primary author and maintainer of the waf-based build system and distributed compile and caching solutions that scale very large, complex project builds
Designed and delivered a Python training course for new hires

South Park Studios, Los Angeles, CA - Sr. Pipeline Developer

NOV 2008 - JAN 2013

Direct dev/support for artist pipeline at the award-winning 18+ season Comedy Central cartoon studio
Maya Python/MEL, Nuke/Shake and Qube! render queue development
Python/PyQt applications for production, asset, tracking and review pipelines

Custom Film Effects, Burbank, CA - Compositor

MAR 2008 - NOV 2008

Compositing, paint, roto and tools; films: Tropic Thunder, Swing Vote, Mamma Mia!, Bride Wars

Sony Pictures Imageworks, Culver City, CA - Sr. Production Service Technician

JAN 2006 - MAR 2008

Films: Watchmen, I Am Legend, Spider-Man 3
Production support, render farm management, image processing, vendor I/O and data archival
Python scripting, pipeline development, and training on Katana, Flame, Houdini, Maya and Massive

Stan Winston Digital, Van Nuys, CA - 2D Digital Artist

JAN 2005 - JUL 2005

Paint, roto and compositing for Eight Below and Fantastic Four

EDUCATION

California State University Long Beach, CA - B.A. Film / Electronic Arts

SEP 2003 - DEC 2005

Film / Video production track; Visual FX courses; directed 4 films

Palomar College and CSU San Marcos, CA - General Education

2001 - MAY 2003

OPEN SOURCE AND OTHER EXPERIENCE

Sole maintainer of gographics/imagick (ImageMagick, 1.9k stars) and author of openimageigo (OpenImageIO), Go bindings for imaging libraries
Maintainer of fileseq (Python) and gofileseq (Go/C++), libraries for parsing frame ranges and sequences
Author of MayaSublime, a Sublime Text plugin for sending Python and MEL to Maya (13K installs)
Author of Python training videos, commercial (cmiVFX) and free on YouTube (125K+ views)
Admin of the Python-Inside-Maya Google group for 14+ years (4300+ members)
DigiPro 2023 Presentation: How Much Cloud is Too Much Cloud?
SIGGRAPH 2017 Presentation: Large Scale VFX Pipelines (20 min)
Visual FX Supervisor: Commander And Chief (2012), The Compass (2009)
Freelance compositing and video production