eriks vitolins

Building solutions for over a decade

I am a self-taught engineer with 15+ years of professional development experience. I am continually driven to utilize technology to solve real-world problems, whether that is to help AWS customers onboard to a cloud-based rendering service or to build customized tools that help artists better perform their tasks.

I've bootstrapped and launched SaaS services under my leadership, co-founded a VR game studio, and also worked on large development teams in a corporate environment. These experiences have shaped me as a developer and how I approach solving problems at different scales. I've gained the expertise to evaluate the needs of the customer and design and deliver a scalable, maintainable solution that provides a delightful experience.

Additionally, with my professional background in character animation and development for feature film visual effects, I also offer a unique skill set to assist within the CG industry. I love to leverage both my technical and creative skills together when possible, and I have often found myself becoming a bridge between creative and technical teams. I truly enjoy designing and improving artist workflows and pipelines to help teams of artists concentrate on the creative process.

Lastly, I take pride in helping others and sharing my experience and knowledge with colleagues. During my career, I've made it a point to assist junior developers and other colleagues to ensure the team thrives and grows. I also encourage teams to formalize internal education and mentoring programs so the teams are able to grow as a whole.

Development skills

Frontend development

Frontend development provides a wide range of scale and technical challenges—from building a simple SPA website to deploying robust, cloud-based service consoles for AWS. I have years of experience working with stakeholders (product, UX, backend engineers, customers, etc.) to bring their visions to reality in a scalable, secure way—while ensuring the user/customer has the best experience possible.

  • Responsive layout
  • Animation and Transitions
  • Accessibility
  • Localization
  • Authorization/Authentication
  • Advanced browser APIs (Video, Canvas, Audio, Performance, MIDI...)
  • Application performance
  • Service monitoring & analytics
  • Packaging, deployment and caching
  • Unit/E2E testing strategy

Backend development

Over the years I've been a part of several projects where it was required to both design and maintain proprietary backends for web-based services and websites. This includes service APIs, deployment pipelines, operations, metrics, and dashboards. When building backend solutions, I'm able to concentrate on building solutions for the expected scale and capacity while ensuring availability and visibility. Below are areas that I have years of experience with:

  • CI/CD pipeline design/management
  • Operations monitoring
  • REST API design and deployment
  • NoSQL and SQL database design
  • Realtime/push-based application features
  • Service integration (Shotgun, Slack, Github, proprietary service APIs, ...)

Creative tools and workflow development

As a tool developer for the creative digital space, I've had several opportunities to research, design, and build both time-saving and quality-increasing solutions for several VFX/animation studios.

Working with the artists, engineers, supervisors, and directors, I can help identify and discuss solutions for bottlenecks, missing features, possible workflow issues and other future goals for improving artists' workflow. After which, I can work with the team to design and propose my recommended solutions and to plan and prioritize the execution of the chosen design.

Technical experience

Agentic AI Claude Code, Cline, Kiro, Cursor, Copilot, OpenAI, Amazon Q
Frontend TypeScript, JavaScript, React, HTML, CSS, VueJS, QT/PySide
Backend Python, NodeJS, Bash, MYSQL, PHP, ASP, C#, Redis, AWS (S3, EC2, CloudFormation/CDK, CloudWatch, IDC, IAM)
Digital Content Creation Maya/MEL, Houdini, Blender, 3DS Max, Unity, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, AfterEffects, Premiere, FinalCut, Logic, ProTools, Figma, AutoCAD

Professional experience

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Frontend Engineer II - 2018-2025

Building an AWS cloud service from the ground up

In 2018, I joined AWS as a frontend engineer. I worked with both the original Nimble Collective team members and AWS veterans to help design and implement a new AWS service based on Nimble Collective and RGB Notes. This required a complete rebuild of the original services, using AWS' internal infrastructure, cloud services, and proprietary UI framework. Once designs were settled, I delivered several key UI components for the service's admin console, including onboarding and resource management UX flows within the service's admin console.

On the backend, I implemented a series of metrics, dashboards, and alarms to monitor the availability and performance of the service. I also implemented unit and E2E testing in a CI/CD pipeline, ensuring service stability and catching flaws before being deployed to production.

After 1 1/2 years of constructing this new AWS-based service from the ground up, we launched the Amazon Nimble Studio to a general audience on April 28, 2021. I continued on the UI team to support the live service, deploy new features, and continually improve the UX for customers.

Launching Amazon Deadline Cloud

After Amazon Nimble Cloud launched, our internal organization took focus on cloud-based rendering and management. A new team was assembled to deliver this new service to complement Nimble Studio. I soon shifted to this team to assist in development and launch.

As the team was on an accelerated schedule to iterate on the UI/UX design, I stepped in to backfill the lack of E2E testing infrastructure and coverage for the admin console UI and portal application. I designed and implemented multi-step form patterns to accommodate onboarding and management wizard UX designs. These featured robust form submission with conditional asynchronous request patterns and graceful error handling and messaging.

On April 2, 2024, I successfully orchestrated the UI team's deployment of the AWS admin console during the Amazon Deadline Cloud's official production launch.

Nimble Collective Lead Frontend Engineer - 2018

Acquisition and service integration

In 2018, as the founder of RGB Notes LLC (see below), I accepted the acquisition offer from our former client Nimble Collective. Their studio-in-the-cloud service was well complemented by the animation review features that RGB provided. After joining, we quickly got to work on integrating the 2 services directly.

Only several months later, Amazon Web Services (AWS) made an offer to acquire Nimble Collective. Our final task before the acquisition was finalized was to transition the codebase to meet the security standards of AWS.

RGB Notes Founder/Developer - 2015-2018

Bootstrapping a successful SaaS startup

After working as a professional animator for close to a decade, it became clear that quality communication tools were required to ensure that creative direction was expressed clearly and efficiently. This was especially true with remote work and satellite studios becoming the norm. Some large studios like Disney or Pixar were able to support their own proprietary systems, but there was little to no public software or service that allowed artists to share and review their work.

Because of this, RGB Notes was born. After the unfortunate bankruptcy of Rhythm and Hues, I took the opportunity as a positive to pursue building a service that I felt was missing from the creative industry.

With the help of the team that I organized, I designed and built browser-based video review SaaS featuring advanced sketch-over and key-framing tools. The service provided many technical challenges, including secure sign-in, media transcoding, user notification, REST API design, and an advanced drawing/brush engine.

Until mid-2018, RGB Notes served thousands of clients, including Nimble Collective, Chapman University, and AnimSchool. From there, I was able to lead the team towards a successful acquisition, joining Nimble Collective to provide a powerful cloud-based studio for artists.

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Blue Sky Studios Animation Technical Director - 2014

Animation Utilities Consultation and Development

I accepted a short contract as an Animation Technical Director to evaluate and develop solutions to help streamline bottlenecks within the animation department's workflow. This included developing both new tools and upgrades to existing tools.

As my contract was short, I quickly onboarded and worked closely with representatives from the rigging, software, pipeline and animation departments. I delivered multiple solutions to streamline their current workflows, allowing artists improved control over their animation. I also introduced new patterns to better handle differences commonly found between productions. This replaced the previous, less maintainable approach of branching individual tool versions for each production.

Some of the most notable tools I built include:

Tween Set in-between keys via a real-time pose tween slider
Transposer Record, edit, and reapply character animation between local and world-space
SimpleSnap Record, edit, and reapply animation of selected objects between local and world-space
ShapeFixer Add and manipulate animator-created blendshapes on rig-deformed characters

Rhythm & Hues Studios Animation | Animation Development - 2005-2014

Animation Development

The Animation Development Team ("AnimDev") was a small group of senior animators (including myself) tasked to oversee and improve the workflows, rigs, and tools animators rely on to produce high-quality content quickly. I worked closely with animation stakeholders (modeling, rigging, technical animation, lighting, VFX & animation directors) to ensure artists received capable, consistent rigs and workflows that empowered them rather than slowed them down. By overseeing all productions concurrently, the AnimDev team developed trusted relationships with other departments and was able to help consolidate solutions that work globally and avoid one-off fixes.

Character/Rig Supervision

Coordinating with upstream and downstream animation stakeholders, I worked closely with artists and supervisors to ensure rigs met animators' control and performance needs. With multiple productions of experience, I helped establish rig UX guidelines, scalable design principles, quality standards, and production-wide tools and workflows—all of which helped streamline future productions.

Life of Pi Facial rig supervision on Tiger, Hyena, Zebra, and Orangutan
Snow White and the Huntsman Facial rig supervision on Troll
Alvin and the Chipmunks Facial rig supervision on Alvin, Simon, and Theodore
Marmaduke Surfing, posable ocean-wave rig supervision & animation

Animation Tool Development

While a lead animator at Rhythm & Hues, I found that many of the tasks that I and others performed as artists could be streamlined. I took extra time to design and build solutions for myself, and soon a library of over 20 utilities was deployed and supported for production use by over 160 animators across all 5 satellite studios.

The increased efficiency these tools provided saved the department roughly 800 person-hours of work (~$45,000) per week.