Crowds (Houdini) Senior/Lead

What does it mean to become a Crowds (Houdini) Lead?

• Define the artistic and technical direction for crowd simulations, reviewing team members' work to ensure quality, realism, and production readiness.
• Oversee the creation of large-scale crowd simulations, procedural agents, and behavioral systems that support the creative vision and technical requirements of each project.
• Plan, assign, and monitor team workload to ensure crowd deliverables are completed on schedule and meet production milestones.
• Collaborate closely with Animation, Layout, Lighting, FX, and other departments to ensure seamless integration of crowd assets throughout the production pipeline.
• Identify and resolve creative and technical challenges while maintaining efficient workflows and optimizing simulation performance.
• Drive continuous improvements to crowd pipelines, procedural tools, automation, and team knowledge through R&D and knowledge sharing.
• Demonstrate strong leadership or teamwork, great communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills while performing effectively under production deadlines.

• Minimum 4–6 years of professional experience creating crowd simulations or FX (houdini).
• Expert proficiency in Houdini, with proven experience building procedural crowd systems, agent behaviors, and large-scale simulations.
• Strong understanding of procedural workflows, crowd behaviors, agent rigging, animation blending, and simulation optimization.
• Experience developing production-ready crowd assets, digital humans, or creature simulations with a focus on scalability and performance.
• Solid understanding of production pipelines and collaboration across Animation, Layout, FX, Lighting, and Compositing departments.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills with the ability to develop efficient technical solutions.
• Experience developing tools or workflow automation using Python, VEX, or HScript is a strong plus.
• Familiarity with physically based simulations, locomotion systems, or MASSIVE is a plus.
• Experience leading, mentoring, or reviewing the work of other Crowd artists in a production environment is a plus.