Santosh Kumar

01 About

I work at the intersection of engineering and production, building the tools artists depend on. My focus is scalable pipeline development and high-quality, well-tested Python: automation systems, asset and shot management, and workflow integrations built on DCC APIs including Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, Houdini and Unreal Engine.

I've supported production teams of 200+ artists, maintained render farms of roughly 200 nodes, and worked directly with TDs, supervisors and production staff to resolve technical issues in fast-paced environments. Alongside VFX, I spent two and a half years on distributed infrastructure at NuNet, building compute orchestration services in Go — experience that continues to shape how I think about reliability and tooling.

I work primarily in Linux-based pipelines and care about what makes tools last: clean architecture, TDD, and the technical briefs and user documentation that determine whether a tool actually gets adopted.

02 Writing

I write about the systems I work with — local AI infrastructure, virtualization and self-hosted tooling.

• Understanding Your First Local AI Stack, Part 2: Models, GGUF and Quantisation 31 Jul 2026
• Understanding Your First Local AI Stack, Part 1: The Big Picture 24 Jul 2026
• Accessing Ollama Remotely with Tailscale 24 May 2026
• Introducing my Homelab and services running within 12 Nov 2024
• I'm Ditching VirtualBox for Something More Linux Native 14 Oct 2024
• My Audio Editing Workflow feat. RNNoise and Audacity 8 Jul 2024

View all posts →

03 Skills

04 Experience

1. Apr 2026 — Present

   Pipeline Technical Director @ Atomic Arts

   • Develop custom pipeline scripts and tools across multiple DCC APIs, including Unreal Engine and ShotGrid, with Unreal Blueprints for film-making and workflow customization.
   • Spearhead project and show setup, ensuring accurate configuration of colour management profiles (ACES) and DCC application settings.
   • Manage industry-standard tooling including Unreal Engine and Perforce for version control and digital asset management in film production.

   Unreal · Perforce · OpenColorIO · ShotGrid · Deadline · Houdini API

2. Oct 2024 — Mar 2026

   Software Developer @ Freelance

   Independent software development across pipeline tooling and web engineering engagements.

3. Apr 2022 — Oct 2024

   Full Stack Developer @ NuNet

   Worked on distributed infrastructure systems responsible for compute orchestration and device management.

   • Developed services for onboarding distributed devices and orchestrating workloads across a decentralized network.
   • Built systems for provisioning workloads inside Firecracker VMs, including network and filesystem configuration.
   • Implemented real-time communication between CLI and backend services over WebSockets.
   • Built GitLab CI pipelines for automated Linux packaging and deployment, and improved observability with OpenTelemetry.

   Go · gRPC · Docker SDK · Firecracker · WebSockets · libp2p · GitLab CI

4. Feb 2021 — Apr 2022

   Full Stack Developer @ Company 3

   formerly Method Studios

   Built internal production tools supporting planning and resource allocation across international VFX teams.

   • Contributed to Resplan, a large-scale resource planning tool used to coordinate artists and production schedules.
   • Developed backend services in Python Flask and MongoDB supporting a distributed SPA.
   • Introduced Docker and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines to streamline frontend and backend deployment, and promoted clean code practices and TDD.

   Python · Flask · MongoDB · Vue · Docker · Jenkins

5. May 2019 — Feb 2021

   Pipeline Developer @ Method Studios

   Developed pipeline tools and services supporting 200+ artists across multiple production teams.

   • Built internal pipeline tools for asset management and production workflows used by multiple departments.
   • Developed a license usage monitoring dashboard integrating Elasticsearch data, visualized in React.
   • Monitored and maintained ~200 render nodes, troubleshooting bottlenecks to keep rendering operations smooth.
   • Maintained production services for asset tracking and pipeline automation, and built client delivery report generation with Python and openpyxl.

   Python · Flask · rez · React · Elasticsearch · openpyxl

6. May 2018 — May 2019

   Technical Artist @ Xentrix Studios

   Worked at the intersection of art and engineering to support production pipelines and artist workflows.

   • Developed XenClip, a pipeline utility extending the system clipboard for production workflows, with user-specific history stored in SQLite.
   • Built a shot and asset packaging system used to prepare and distribute assets for production.
   • Implemented modular architecture using the Abstract Factory pattern to support differing project requirements.
   • Introduced Git version control practices and deployed an internal Gogs Git server.

   Python · Qt · Maya API · Nuke API · SQLite · MySQL

05 Education

06 Contact

Based in Patna, India. Open to conversations about pipeline engineering, production tooling and distributed systems.