Staff Engineer, Storage Metadata and Context

Job ID R-04164 Location Emeryville, California, United States Business Pixar Animation Studios Date posted Nov. 03, 2026

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Job Summary:

Every great creative project needs a spark—and we’re the team that collaborates to support and organize the digital media behind the magic. As our data scales, we want to close a growing context gap between our technical storage hierarchies and the natural language of our creative teams. As a Staff Engineer at the intersection of Data Platforms and AI, you will architect the software layers that enable our production-facing storage to become context-aware. Your mission is to design the APIs, Metadata services, and MCP implementations that allow AI agents to navigate and reason across Petabytes of high-value media assets. You will help to bridge the gap between traditional HPC protocols and a modern Agentic ecosystem.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Architect Semantic Connectivity: Develop and maintain the software layer that exposes existing NAS environments (NFS, SMB, S3) to AI agents and LLM frameworks through modern API abstractions and MCPs
Implement Model Context Protocol (MCP): Lead the implementation of MCP servers to provide a standardized interface for AI models to safely and efficiently browse, read, and interpret data within our HPC storage
Semantic Discovery & Agentic Connectivity: Design automated systems to deconstruct the implicit context stored in long-path hierarchies and file headers, architecting the "connective tissue" (REST, gRPC, MCP) that enables AI agents to resolve complex creative queries without needing direct knowledge of underlying mount paths or protocols
Cross-Disciplinary Collaborator: Act as a critical "bridge" across technical storage teams, software tool designers, and creative artists—adapting your communication style to translate deeply technical concepts into practical, workflow-enhancing solutions for non-technical users
Data & Metadata Orchestration: Manage the state and relationship between raw file data and its digital twin in the metadata layer, ensuring that relational and semantic data remain in sync as the studio library evolves
Context Feature Enablement: Enable "smart" features within existing storage such as auto-tagging, similarity search, and automated summarizing
On-call: Ability to participate in an on-call rotation for critical issues

QUALIFICATIONS:

Full-Stack Storage Expertise: Ability to bridge the gap between the data center and the AI agent. You leverage your background in architecting, managing, and troubleshooting physical and/or virtual storage solutions to inform how agentic workflows and metadata pipelines access underlying data at petabyte scale
Broad Protocol Knowledge: Expertise in how data is accessed and managed across NFS, SMB, and S3. You understand the nuances of file-locking, permissions, and latency across different storage protocols
API & Middleware Development: Proven experience building APIs (REST, gRPC) and middleware that sit between raw storage and application layers
Model Context Protocol (MCP) & AI Tooling: Understanding of MCP and how to build tool-calling interfaces for LLMs
Metadata Engineering: Proven ability to design schemas and indexing pipelines using Kafka, ElasticSearch, or Vector DBs to represent physical files as semantic entities
3+ Years of Software-Driven Infrastructure: Recent experience in scale environments where you've transitioned manual workflows into programmatic, API-driven services
The Translator Mindset: Ability to translate abstract creative needs (e.g., "I need to see all iterations of this scene") into technical metadata queries that return precise results
Versatile Backend Development: High degree of comfort working across various programming languages to build the foundational "glue" that connects storage metrics and file data to agentic frameworks; deep proficiency in Python is a significant plus

PREFERRED SKILLS:

Modern AI Frameworks: Hands-on experience with agentic libraries, with a focus on building custom data connectors and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures
Containerization & Orchestration: Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for scaling metadata extraction and embedding workers
HPC Awareness: Understanding of the performance characteristics of high-end storage (Vast, NetApp, StorageGrid, AWS) and how to minimize the overhead of metadata operations
Creative Pipeline Interest: A passion for digital content creation and an interest in how AI can accelerate and modernize production workflows

The hiring range for this position in Emeryville is $182,835.00 to $236,610.00 per year. The base pay actually offered will take into account internal equity and also may vary depending on the candidate’s geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

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About Pixar Animation Studios:

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renoinswned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation. The Northern California studio has created some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Cars,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “WALL•E,” “Up,” “Toy Story 3,” “Brave,” “Inside Out,” and “Coco.” Its movies have won 35 Academy Awards® and have grossed more than $13 billion at the worldwide box office to date.

About The Walt Disney Company:

The Walt Disney Company, together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise that includes three core business segments: Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and Disney Experiences. From humble beginnings as a cartoon studio in the 1920s to its preeminent name in the entertainment industry today, Disney proudly continues its legacy of creating world-class stories and experiences for every member of the family. Disney’s stories, characters and experiences reach consumers and guests from every corner of the globe. With operations in more than 40 countries, our employees and cast members work together to create entertainment experiences that are both universally and locally cherished.

This position is with Pixar Inc., which is part of a business we call Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. Applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military or veteran status, medical condition, genetic information or disability, or any other basis prohibited by federal, state or local law. Disney champions a business environment where ideas and decisions from all people help us grow, innovate, create the best stories and be relevant in a constantly evolving world.

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