Production Engineering Intern - Summer 2026 (Open to Canadian Citizens & PR only)

Job ID 10138551 Location Vancouver, Canada Business Industrial Light & Magic Date posted Dec. 12, 2025

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Job Summary:

This role is considered Hybrid, which means the employee will work 2-3 days onsite at a Company designated location and occasionally from home.

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) invites you to apply to our Production Engineering internship in Vancouver and contribute to the exciting world of visual effects (VFX). ILM strives to be an inclusive environment, embracing promising individuals from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Our interns embody the innovative spirit, creative talent, collaborative mindset, and passion for great filmmaking that defines ILM. If you love art, technology, and sharing knowledge while learning from others, this is the environment for you.

Position Summary

Production Engineers build and maintain software used by other developers and artists within ILM, spanning domains such as our media creation pipeline, software building, deployment and monitoring, as well as artist-facing tooling in digital content creation software such as Maya, Nuke, and Katana.

ILM’s Production Engineering group develops the ground-breaking technology that empowers our artists to create dazzling visuals. ILM’s innovations have won 38 Scientific and Technical Academy Awards®. Today, we are 70+ visually-minded software engineers, working side-by-side with over a thousand digital artists in a fast-paced, intensely collaborative, creative film production environment, across studios in San Francisco, Vancouver, London, Sydney, and Mumbai.

This internship will give you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with a professional engineering environment, receive mentorship from leaders in the VFX industry, and contribute to real projects during your internship. This is a great opportunity to develop professional interpersonal skills as well as practical experience in this field.

We welcome candidates with a passion for applying the latest machine learning technology to these challenges and more!

Applications will close on January 12, 2026.

What You Need to Know

You must be a Canadian Citizen or hold Canadian Permanent Resident status
You must be attending an Undergraduate program from a public Canadian post-secondary education institution, and returning to your studies following the internship
This is a paid 4-month internship, beginning May 4, 2026
This role is considered Hybrid, which means you will work onsite at our Vancouver studio and occasionally from home
You will be required to work full-time, 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm
We do not provide assistance for relocation, housing, transportation, or work authorization for internships

What You'll Do

We seek interns to join one of our many Production Engineering teams and help us develop tools and production techniques across all areas of visual effects and feature animation production:

Image processing, compositing, and rotoscoping, including depth estimation, image segmentation, generative in-painting, and plate relighting
Simulating natural phenomena, rigid-body destruction, crowds and procedural animation
Lighting, texturing, look-development, and layered material definition
Modelling, rigging, and animation of bodies and faces, including soft-body dynamic simulation of cloth, hair, and flesh
Tools, structures, and pipeline systems that define how artists assemble and manage massively complex 3D scenes, and user interfaces for authoring, validating, publishing, and tracking 3D and 2D data as it moves through a network of automated batch processes
Develop tools and/or services for one of our Production Engineering teams
Work with engineers across all of ILM’s studios, splitting time between long-term software development projects and day-to-day artist support, consultation, and problem-solving

What We’re Looking For

Pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a related field (candidates within one year of graduation are also welcome)
Excellent verbal and written communication skills with strong interpersonal skills
Proficiency in Linux as well as a programming language like Python or C++
Passion for applying technology to film and visual effects
Ability to work autonomously and in team settings with a positive, pro-active attitude
Nice to have:
- Experience using Maya, Houdini, Katana, Mari or other digital content creation applications.
- Proven experience with machine learning, web frameworks, and/or data stores
- Familiarity with industry-standard data formats like OpenEXR, OpenVDB, Alembic, and USD
- Passion for designing artist-friendly interfaces using GUI toolkits: Qt, PySide, QML, etc. You don’t need to be a professional UX designer, but you should have a keen sense for how creative people use technology to work together in production
- Appreciation of software development principles: object-oriented design, test-driven development, source code management, build and release processes
- Familiarity with film and video postproduction and/or computer graphics techniques is highly desired

JoinILM

The pay rate for this role in Vancouver is C$30.00 per hour. Select benefits may be provided as part of the compensation package, such as medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the level and position offered.

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About Industrial Light & Magic:

Founded in 1975 by George Lucas, ILM is the leading effects facility in the world, serving the motion picture, commercial production, and attraction industries. ILM has created visual effects for over 325 feature films and has played a key role in seven of the top 10 worldwide box-office hits of all time and has contributed to 25 of the top 50. ILM has set the standard for visual effects, creating some of the most stunning images in the history of film. At the forefront of the digital revolution, the company continues to break new ground in visual effects, VR, AR, and Immersive Cinema.

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 ILM (Vancouver) Inc., which is part of a business we call Industrial Light & Magic.

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