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Cesar Saez

London, UK - +44 730 756 4233 - hi@cesarsaez.com

Engineering Leader

Engineering leader with 20+ years of technical experience, from writing C++ and Python for visual effects to leading engineering teams, scaling organisations, and shaping how they work. I’ve worked across research, product engineering, and large-scale production platforms, consistently operating above my formal title by holding the frame rather than the authority.

Leading a team of PhD researchers in a domain I knew less deeply than the team I was leading taught me the most important lesson of my career: that real ownership must be delegated, and that my success is measured by the team’s rather than by the code I write. I retain the technical depth to engage meaningfully with architectural decisions and step into critical work when delivery is at risk, but the proof I care about is what gets built after I step back, and that is the only metric I have ever found worth optimising for.

Contact me

Selected Organisational Impact

  • Leadership Pipeline: Four engineers developed into or preparing for management roles across three organisations; currently coaching two peer engineering managers.
  • Operating Model Design: Organisational structure and ways of working I designed scaled across a four-team engineering organisation and two product areas.
  • Strategic Influence: Two company-wide initiatives at director level or above, one in flight, one shipped, originated from my framing.

Skills

  • Engineering Leadership: Multi-Team Management, Organisation Design, Coaching & Developing Leaders, Performance & Promotion, Technical Hiring
  • Strategy & Delivery: Engineering Strategy, Roadmap Planning, Executive Communication, Cross-Functional Leadership, Operating Models, Delivery Process Design
  • Technical: C++ & Python, System Architecture, High-Performance & GPU Computing, OpenUSD, Research Engineering, Developer Experience

Experience

Foundry, London

Lead Software Engineer, Katana (Engineering Manager)

Jul 2025 - Present

  • Managed two engineering teams (~13 people across engineering, QA, and product) delivering the core of Katana. Shipped the major Katana 8.5/9.0 release across two VFX reference platforms and maintained a steady cadence of patch releases throughout, expanding from one team to two after an org restructuring.
  • Kept a team delivering consistently ahead of schedule after it lost its lead architect mid-project, creating enough slack that the team proposed and shipped an additional feature in a single sprint, rounding out the Katana 9 release.
  • Designed a delivery process adopted across the entire Katana product line: a rotating Feature Facilitator role that shifted refinement sessions from ad-hoc discovery to cross-functional preparation, increasing tickets refined per session from 2-3 to 10+. Designed within one team, adopted voluntarily by the other two.
  • Drove two company-wide AI initiatives above my formal scope: identified an extensibility opportunity, validated it with major VFX studios, and developed it into a proposal adopted at director level; co-authored Foundry’s engineering guidelines for AI-assisted development, now shipped across the organisation.
  • Identified and closed a 15-year tooling gap in Katana’s Python development environment, enabling LSP and debugger support for every engineer on the product. Prototyped independently, built the case through a tech talk, and shipped during an innovation sprint without disrupting team delivery.
  • Invested actively in people development beyond my formal scope: two peer EMs coached at my manager’s request, two former directs supported through their transition into management, and a senior engineer in Flix mentored at the CTO’s recommendation.

Foundry, London

Lead Software Engineer, AI Research (Engineering Manager)

Jul 2022 - Jul 2025

  • Grew a single research team into a two-team organisation I managed directly (~9 people), creating the operating model that a four-team organisation later scaled on. As demand grew, hired into the team, split the work into two focused groups, and established the structure and ways of working adopted by subsequent teams.
  • Developed two senior engineers into engineering managers who now lead their own teams, one through a year of deliberate coaching on skill gaps and career direction, one by recognising her readiness and creating the conditions for her to step up.
  • Led researchers shipping production ML capabilities for Nuke, including major expansions to CopyCat and Inference, and laid the research foundations for features that shipped in subsequent releases.
  • Owned product and delivery responsibilities alongside engineering leadership when the organisation lacked dedicated roles: set roadmaps with product stakeholders, ran planning and tracking, and presented the organisation’s work to the executive team at quarterly reviews; designed the technical hiring framework for research engineering, later adopted by other groups across the organisation.

Foundry, London

Senior Software Engineer, Real-Time Research

Sep 2020 - Jul 2022

  • As the most senior engineer on the early Nuke Stage team, prototyped across the full stack while the product direction was still being defined: GPU kernels, application architecture, camera-tracking integration, and networking. The exploratory work shaped the direction the shipping product was built on and is now used on live film productions.
  • Joined as the OpenUSD expert and built the early prototype of Nuke’s OpenUSD-based 3D system in collaboration with the lead architect. The prototype was greenlit and matured by the team into what ships today.

DNEG, London

Software Engineer, R&D

Aug 2019 - Sep 2020

  • Designed and built the asset resolution system for the studio’s OpenUSD-based Scene Description platform, the layer responsible for locating and loading assets across productions, and contributed fixes and improvements to core platform systems as part of the production technology team.
  • Built foundational tools used across major feature-film productions, including Tenet, No Time to Die, and Fast & Furious 9, the kind of core pipeline systems that outlast any single project.

Animal Logic (now Netflix Animation), Sydney

Software Engineer, R&D

Feb 2016 - Aug 2019

  • Created an in-house authoring framework that changed how the entire rigging team worked, and maintained it across feature animation pipelines. Work used on productions including Captain Marvel, The LEGO Movie 2, and the Peter Rabbit series.
  • Contributed to Animal Logic’s early adoption of OpenUSD at feature-film scale, one of the first studios outside Pixar to do so. Solved the source-of-truth sync problem in a mixed pipeline mid-migration, and helped design the holistic approach that followed.

VFX Industry, Multiple Studios

Rigging Supervisor / Lead & Senior Character TD

2005 - 2015

  • Rigging Supervisor at Kandor Graphics, leading the rigging department through full feature-film production, managing a team of artists and coordinating across animation and tools teams.
  • Senior Character TD across features, episodic, and commercial productions including The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Ninjago Movie, with credits spanning over a decade of internationally released work.

Recommendations

Cesar is a skilled software engineer who believes in the craft of coding and has a great understanding of how software fits together. He doesn't settle for what's worked in the past, but is an innovator who searches for newer, better and cooler ways to do things.
– Eoin Murphy, Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA
I had the pleasure of working with Cesar for The Lego Batman movie and Lego Ninjago Movie. He was a great problem solver and was always looking for ways to improve our processes and pipeline. I depended on him to assist our more entry level team members and he did a great job teaching us new ways to produce better code.
– Josh Murtack, Senior Creature Technical Director at Weta FX
The best assets of Cesar are their creativity in front of problems and his incredible human touch. During his time as Lead Character TD, he worked to provide flexibility and reliability to the rigs, as well as tools for all the departments. Then, he took the helm of the rigging department and thanks to him we were able to work as a solid team, bringing solutions for all the studio, and facing long-term goals for next productions. And after all this, it seems that we only scratch the surface of his ideas and potential.
– Ricard Miras Bellavista, Character TD and Developer at 23lunes
Cesar has an excellent balance of innovation and productivity. He is always thinking about faster, cleaner and reusable ways to achieve things but never forgets that his tools and rigs will be used by people in a real production. Furthermore, he likes teamwork and is willing to help colleagues. I am lucky to be working with him.
– Angel Pavon, Core Development Manager at Raw Gaming Group

Education

Universidad Central, Chile

B.Sc. in Construction Engineering

2000 - 2005

Passed with Distinction

Social Links

  • Github: https://www.github.com/csaez
  • Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@cesarsaez
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cesarsaez
  • Website: https://www.cesarsaez.com