DILEN SHAH
SCENE 001 · "COLD OPEN"24 FPS

a film-length career, starring

DILENSHAH.

Fifteen years making creatures move for cinema.

Now a senior software engineer designing the systems that run behind the story: APIs, data pipelines, and the domain models that keep them honest.

Roll film Contact
Dilen Shah
STILL 001 · ADELAIDE, AUSREC
THOR: RAGNAROK (2017) ✦ PETER RABBIT (2018) ✦ TOMB RAIDER (2018) ✦ SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) ✦ CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) ✦ DUMBO (2019) ✦ CATS (2019) ✦ MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) ✦ SHANG-CHI (2021) ✦ THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER (2022) ✦ THE BOYS S3 (2022) ✦ LOTR: THE RINGS OF POWER (2022) ✦ ANDOR (2022) ✦ ANT-MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (2023) ✦ INDIANA JONES & THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023) ✦ THE FLASH (2023) ✦ AHSOKA (2023) ✦ LOKI S2 (2023) ✦ ONE PIECE (2023) ✦ MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS (2023) ✦ THE FALL GUY (2024) ✦ KNUCKLES (2024) ✦ HAROLD & THE PURPLE CRAYON (2024) ✦ SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3 (2024) ✦ THOR: RAGNAROK (2017) ✦ PETER RABBIT (2018) ✦ TOMB RAIDER (2018) ✦ SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019) ✦ CAPTAIN MARVEL (2019) ✦ DUMBO (2019) ✦ CATS (2019) ✦ MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) ✦ SHANG-CHI (2021) ✦ THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER (2022) ✦ THE BOYS S3 (2022) ✦ LOTR: THE RINGS OF POWER (2022) ✦ ANDOR (2022) ✦ ANT-MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (2023) ✦ INDIANA JONES & THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023) ✦ THE FLASH (2023) ✦ AHSOKA (2023) ✦ LOKI S2 (2023) ✦ ONE PIECE (2023) ✦ MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS (2023) ✦ THE FALL GUY (2024) ✦ KNUCKLES (2024) ✦ HAROLD & THE PURPLE CRAYON (2024) ✦ SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3 (2024) ✦

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Years in production

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Screen credits

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Continents

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Careers, one craft

“Every pipeline I've ever built started the same way: a hard deadline, and something that didn't exist yet. The creatures changed into systems. The discipline never did.”

( ACT I · 2009 - 2021 )

THE FRAME

Visual effects is software engineering with an audience of one: the camera. Every creature that holds up on screen is a system that held up under deadline.

SCENE 002

2012 - 2016

The Rigging Years

Rigging Artist → Lead Rigging TD

DWARF ANIMATION STUDIO · MONTPELLIER, FRANCE

Learned the trade the honest way: building character rigs and the Python tools around them for episodic animation, then leading the department and writing the studio's Python training curriculum from scratch.

ON THE CALL SHEET

  • Monchichi
  • Pirata & Capitano
  • Lune et le Loup
  • Michelin
  • Cartier

SCENE 003

2016 - 2021

Creatures at Scale

Senior → Lead Creature TD

MR. X · MILL FILM · TORONTO & ADELAIDE

Creature pipelines for blockbusters: muscle systems, deformation rigs, and the automation that let small teams deliver hero creatures on brutal schedules. Lead credits across Marvel, Warner Bros. and Sony shows.

ON THE CALL SHEET

  • Thor: Ragnarok
  • Spider-Man: Far From Home
  • Captain Marvel
  • Dumbo
  • Cats
  • Mortal Kombat
  • Shang-Chi

SCENE 004

2021 - 2024

Running the Department

Creature Supervisor → Pipeline & Show TD

RISING SUN PICTURES · ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA

Supervised creature teams across simultaneous shows: planning, bidding, mentoring, and shipping. Then moved one layer deeper and built the pipeline itself as a show technical director.

ON THE CALL SHEET

  • Thor: Love and Thunder
  • The Flash
  • Loki S2
  • The Rings of Power
  • Andor
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3
( THE MATCH CUT )
RIGSDOMAIN MODELS
RENDER FARMCELERY FLEETS
FRAMESMETER READINGS
SHOTSBILLING RUNS
DAILIESDAILY DEPLOYS

The medium changed. The craft didn't.CUT TO: ACT II

ACT I · THE FRAMEACT II · THE SYSTEM

( ACT II · 2021 - PRESENT )

THE SYSTEM

The audience changed from a camera to a production floor, then to a whole industry. The stakes only went up: when a billing system gets a frame wrong, everyone notices.

SCENE 005

2021 →

Pipeline Engineering

Senior Software Engineer

RISING SUN PICTURES · ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA

Crossed from using the pipeline to building it. Architected the REST APIs that synchronise production data across global sites, tuned the databases underneath them, and made deployments boring, which is the highest compliment infrastructure can earn.

SYSTEM READOUT

  • ▸50K+ REQ / DAY
  • ▸-60% QUERY LATENCY
  • ▸99.5% DEPLOY SUCCESS
  • ▸200+ CONCURRENT USERS

SCENE 006

LEAD

Running the Room

Lead Work & Team Leadership

ENGINEERING TEAMS · MULTI-SITE

Led engineers the way good supervisors lead artists: clear briefs, honest reviews, and no surprises in the final render. Designed plugin architecture for 15+ integrations, built async task queues processing 10,000+ jobs a day, and mentored TDs making the same artist-to-engineer jump I did.

SYSTEM READOUT

  • ▸15+ INTEGRATIONS
  • ▸10K+ JOBS / DAY
  • ▸3 SITES, 1 CODEBASE
  • ▸ZERO-DOWNTIME RELEASES

SCENE 007

NOW

The Energy Domain

Domain-Driven Design · Kraken-Grade Systems

UTILITY-SCALE DATA PLATFORMS

Currently deep in the energy sector's hardest problems: domain modelling for billing platforms in the mould of Kraken, D0010 meter-reading flows, and event-driven ingestion built to survive 10M+ readings a day. Different creatures, same insistence that the model must match reality.

SYSTEM READOUT

  • ▸DDD & SERVICE LAYERS
  • ▸D0010 FLOW PARSING
  • ▸10M+ READINGS / DAY
  • ▸IMMUTABLE AUDIT TRAILS

( OPEN SOURCE )

THE ENGINEERING REEL

Three repos, all public, all tested, all shipped: Celery observability for Django teams, typed parsers for the UK energy industry, and the utility CLI I wish every pipeline had.

OSS-01Django × Celery Observability

django-taskpulse

Celery task monitoring inside Django admin with zero extra infrastructure: no Flower, no polling, no separate service. Signal-driven lifecycle tracking with colored state badges and a stats dashboard.

CELERY SIGNALS → TASKRUN ROWS → ADMIN BADGES
STATS: FAILURE RATE · AVG / P95 RUNTIME
  • Hooks task_received → task_failure signals, one row per task id
  • Read-only admin: state filters, tracebacks, task-id search
  • TASKPULSE_* settings + retention purge command
  • 49 tests · CI across Django 4.2/5.1 × Python 3.10-3.12
PythonDjango 4.2+/5.xCelery 5.xpytest-django

$ pip install git+https://github.com/dilenshah23/django-taskpulse

View on GitHub
OSS-02UK Energy Industry Data

energy-flows

Typed, zero-dependency Python parsers for UK energy DTC flow files, starting with D0010 meter readings. Built for the domain: exact Decimals, timezone-aware timestamps, and errors that tell you the line number.

ZHV → 026 MPAN → 028 METER → 030 READING → ZPT
  • Streaming parser with strict & lenient modes
  • Mod-11 MPAN check-digit validation
  • Optional Django app: models, admin, atomic import service
  • 74 tests · extensible record registry (D0019 next)
Python 3.10+Zero depsDjango extraGitHub Actions

$ pip install git+https://github.com/dilenshah23/energy-flows.git

View on GitHub
OSS-03Developer Tooling

toolbelt

Production-honed CLI utilities from fifteen years of pipeline work, in one install. Safe by default: destructive commands preview first and every applied operation writes an undo manifest.

tb seq · bulk (+undo) · watch · dedup · logs
  • Sequence gap detection + two-phase safe renumbering
  • Batch rename/move: dry-run by default, JSON undo manifests
  • Poll-based watcher, SHA-256 dedup, colored log tailing
  • 60 tests · consistent exit codes for CI scripting
Python 3.10+TyperRichGitHub Actions

$ pip install git+https://github.com/dilenshah23/toolbelt.git

View on GitHub

( TWO TOOLKITS )

ONE CRAFT

Nothing was thrown away. The instincts that made creatures hold up on screen are the same ones that keep systems honest in production.

REEL A · ACT I

The VFX Toolkit

  • Maya API (Python & C++)
  • USD & Scene Description
  • Rigging & Deformation Systems
  • RenderMan · Yeti
  • Pipeline & Show Tools
  • Creature Supervision

CARRIED ACROSS

The Constants

  • Python (15+ years)
  • C++ · SQL · Bash
  • Systems Thinking
  • Automation as Instinct
  • Leading Teams
  • Calm Under Deadline

REEL B · ACT II

The Engineering Toolkit

  • Django · DRF · FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL & Query Tuning
  • Celery · Redis · RabbitMQ
  • Docker · Kubernetes · CI/CD
  • Domain-Driven Design
  • Event-Driven Architecture

( END CREDITS )

35+ PRODUCTIONS

Fifteen years of call sheets, from French animation studios to Marvel tentpoles.

( 2009 - 2024 )

( FEATURE FILMS )

Pipeline & Show Technical Director

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Creature Supervisor

Harold & the Purple Crayon

Creature Supervisor

The Fall Guy

Creature Supervisor

The Flash

Creature Supervisor

Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny

Creature Supervisor

Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania

Creature Supervisor

Thor: Love and Thunder

Lead Digital Artist

Finch

Lead Creature TD

Shang-Chi

Lead Creature TD

Mortal Kombat

Lead Creature TD

Cats

Senior Creature TD

Captain Marvel

Lead Creature TD

The Eight Hundred

Senior Creature TD

Dumbo

Lead Creature TD

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Lead Creature TD

Animal World

Senior Creature TD

Tomb Raider

Lead Creature TD

Peter Rabbit

Senior Creature TD

Thor: Ragnarok

( TELEVISION )

Creature Supervisor

Loki Season 2

Creature Supervisor

Knuckles

Creature Supervisor

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Creature Supervisor

One Piece

Creature Supervisor

Ahsoka

Creature Supervisor

LOTR: The Rings of Power

Creature Supervisor

Andor Season 1

Creature Supervisor

See Season 3

Creature Supervisor

The Boys Season 3

Lead Rigging TD

Monchichi

Senior Rigging TD

Pirata & Capitano

Rigging Artist

Lune et le Loup

( COMMERCIALS )

Rigging TD

Emarat TV

Rigging TD

Michelin

Character TD

SNCF Campaign

Character TD

Cartier: Winter Tale

( FEATURE FILMS )

Pipeline & Show Technical Director

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Creature Supervisor

Harold & the Purple Crayon

Creature Supervisor

The Fall Guy

Creature Supervisor

The Flash

Creature Supervisor

Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny

Creature Supervisor

Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania

Creature Supervisor

Thor: Love and Thunder

Lead Digital Artist

Finch

Lead Creature TD

Shang-Chi

Lead Creature TD

Mortal Kombat

Lead Creature TD

Cats

Senior Creature TD

Captain Marvel

Lead Creature TD

The Eight Hundred

Senior Creature TD

Dumbo

Lead Creature TD

Spider-Man: Far From Home

Lead Creature TD

Animal World

Senior Creature TD

Tomb Raider

Lead Creature TD

Peter Rabbit

Senior Creature TD

Thor: Ragnarok

( TELEVISION )

Creature Supervisor

Loki Season 2

Creature Supervisor

Knuckles

Creature Supervisor

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Creature Supervisor

One Piece

Creature Supervisor

Ahsoka

Creature Supervisor

LOTR: The Rings of Power

Creature Supervisor

Andor Season 1

Creature Supervisor

See Season 3

Creature Supervisor

The Boys Season 3

Lead Rigging TD

Monchichi

Senior Rigging TD

Pirata & Capitano

Rigging Artist

Lune et le Loup

( COMMERCIALS )

Rigging TD

Emarat TV

Rigging TD

Michelin

Character TD

SNCF Campaign

Character TD

Cartier: Winter Tale

( EPILOGUE )

THE NEXT ACT.

Not chasing a new role right now, but good conversations about domain-heavy platforms, open source, or making the artist-to-engineer jump are always welcome.

INT. YOUR PROJECT - DAY

Status

Heads-down building, not currently looking

Location

Adelaide, Australia

Remote-friendly, timezone-flexible