3D Render Pipeline Lead at Nick Scali in North Ryde, NSW, au

Company Description

As market leaders and experts in luxury furniture design, we take pride in our commitment to quality and innovation.

For over 60 years, Nick Scali has been a nationally recognised household name in the Australian furniture industry. Following our acquisition of Plush Sofas in late 2021, we now operate over 115 showrooms across Australia and New Zealand, with exciting plans for further expansion in 2027.

Join an iconic Australian retail organisation and be part of an international ASX-listed company that values career development in a supportive team environment.

As we continue to grow, we are seeking an experienced 3D Render Pipeline Lead to join our Marketing team.

What we offer

• Ownership of a production pipeline that puts thousands of images in front of customers every month.
• Room to automate. We want the pipeline to get faster every quarter, and you'll have the support to make that happen.
• A role in our E-Commerce team, reporting to the E-Commerce Manager.

Job Description

About the role

Nick Scali shows its furniture online with photorealistic CGI. We render every lounge configuration in every fabric and leather we sell. That means complete lounges, not individual modular pieces. Each one is rendered as 32 frames for our own 360° spinner, in 4K so customers can zoom in and see the detail. Our render pipeline is semi-automated and delivers hundreds of SKUs every week to our Nick Scali and Plush websites.

We're hiring a 3D Render Pipeline Lead to run that pipeline and make it faster, cheaper and more automated. This is a technical role. You'll build CGI in 3ds Max and Corona, but most of your impact will come from scripting, batching, render farm management and quality control at volume.

You'll also manage a group of freelance 3D modellers. You'll brief them, hold them to our modelling standards, and make sure every model is named and stored correctly in our DAM so it can be rendered again in any new material for years to come.

The pipeline you'll own

You'll own the journey from supplier spec sheet to finished, correctly named renders in our DAM: modelling, material setup, batch rendering on a cloud render farm, automated post-processing and upload. From there, publishing to our websites is automated. Full pipeline details are shared with shortlisted candidates.

What you'll do

Run the pipeline at volume

• Plan and ship weekly render releases, from setup through farm submission, processing and upload.
• Manage render farm jobs, priority and spend. Test before committing, catch failures early, and keep cost per SKU down.
• QA every batch before it reaches our DAM: naming, frame count, framing, material accuracy and artefacts.

Automate and scale

• Grow weekly throughput by removing manual steps: scene setup, pass building, file handling and upload.
• Build tooling so new materials can be applied retrospectively to existing models and re-rendered in bulk, without manual setup.
• Keep our scripts and render setups documented, versioned and reliable.

Lead the freelance modellers

• Brief freelancers with supplier images, spec sheets and dimensions, and keep their work moving on schedule.
• Review every model against our standards before it's accepted, including topology, scale, UVs, detailing and naming.
• Make sure approved models are stored correctly in our DAM.

Create materials

• Build new fabric and leather materials in Corona from supplier swatches when ranges change, and match colours to physical samples.

Report

• Report weekly to the E-Commerce Manager on output, blockers, farm spend and what's next.

Your first 90 days

First 30 days: learn the pipeline end to end from our documentation and the team. Ship weekly releases on time, and take over freelancer briefing and QA.

By day 60: map every manual step in the pipeline and its time cost. Ship your first automation win, and propose a plan to re-render existing models in new materials.

By day 90: ship the retrospective re-material workflow, and show a clear increase in weekly SKU output or a lower cost per SKU.

How we'll measure success

• SKUs delivered per week, and on-time weekly releases
• Render farm cost per SKU
• First-time-right rate: renders that pass QA without a re-render
• Freelance model acceptance rate and turnaround time
• Backlog of new materials still to be applied to existing models

Qualifications

What you'll need

• Strong Python, proven in production. You've written and maintained scripts that other people rely on every week, not one-off snippets. Think batch file processing, renaming and validation, image resizing and conversion, moving files between systems, and logging errors so failures are caught early. You can show us the code.
• 3ds Max automation with MAXScript and/or pymxs. You've automated scene setup, material assignment, camera and pass creation, and batch export, so nobody has to do repetitive work by hand.
• Rendering at scale. You've run production pipelines delivering hundreds to thousands of images a week, with many variants from one scene, consistent cameras and lighting, and repeatable output. You can tell us your weekly volumes, how you got them up, and what broke along the way.
• Cloud render farm experience at volume: job setup, test renders, priority and cost management, failed-frame recovery, and keeping cost per image down across large batches.
• 3ds Max and Corona Renderer at a high, photorealistic standard, in production.
• Hard-surface and soft-goods modelling for furniture: clean quad topology, real-world scale from technical drawings, and seams, piping and stitching modelled into the mesh.
• Physically based material creation in Corona: fabric and leather textures, tileable maps, and colour matching to physical swatches.
• QA discipline at volume. You build automated checks where you can, and you can review hundreds of images a week and still catch the one wrong file name.
• Experience managing freelancers or outsourced artists: clear briefs, honest feedback and deadlines that hold.
• Comfort with Jira or a similar tracker, and the habit of keeping tickets, dates and statuses current.

Nice to have

• Experience with a digital asset management (DAM) platform, metadata and naming conventions.
• Product configurators, or furniture or retail CGI at catalogue scale.
• Substance Designer or Sampler for material authoring.
• Git or another version control system for scripts and tooling.

Additional Information

How to apply

Send us:

1. Your CV.
2. A portfolio of product CGI (furniture preferred), with wireframes and render breakdowns.
3. A short note, up to half a page, about a render or pipeline process you automated: what was manual, what you built and what it saved.

Shortlisted candidates will complete a paid technical test: model a sofa module from a supplier spec sheet, set it up with materials we supply, and write a short script that renames a folder of renders to a naming convention we provide.