Staff Graphics Engineer, Rendering (Simulation)
Job Location:
Sunnyvale, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Posted on:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
Job Description
Remote: This role is open to a fully remote position or hybrid with one of our offices if preferred.
Role Overview
As a Staff Graphics Engineer on the Rendering team you will push the visual and physical fidelity of a GPU-accelerated physically-based sensor simulator used to generate synthetic data cameras LiDAR radar and depth sensors for autonomous vehicle development and validation. This is a deep graphics role: you will own and advance the light transport materials atmosphere and sensor-imaging pipelines that determine how realistic our rendered output is. Your work directly affects the quality of the synthetic data that AV perception and planning teams train and validate against where physical accuracy is not a nice to have but the entire point.
We render with NVIDIA OptiX and CUDA evaluate physically-based materials through NVIDIA MDL and produce spectrally-derived radiometrically-grounded imagery. Were looking for someone with a genuine graphics background the kind of engineer who has implemented a BRDF from a paper debugged energy loss in a microfacet model and cares about the difference between physically plausible and physically correct.
About the Team
The Rendering team builds the physically-based rendering core of our sensor simulation platform. We own the full path from scene and material ingestion through GPU ray tracing atmospheric and volumetric rendering sensor image formation and post-processing. Our stack includes C (17/20) CUDA NVIDIA OptiX NVIDIA MDL OpenUSD and ROS. We care about light transport correctness radiometric accuracy performance on real production scenes and clean maintainable architecture.
Why Join Us
- Work on real hard rendering problems light transport physically-based materials atmospheric and volumetric scattering and sensor image formation where physical correctness is the product.
- Own meaningful surface area: the sky/atmosphere system the materials pipeline the camera imaging pipeline or the core ray tracing path depending on your strengths.
- Influence the technical direction of a rendering platform used across the organization for perception training closed-loop simulation and reinforcement learning.
- Join a team that values rigor papers derivations reference comparisons and pixel-level regression testing alongside pragmatic engineering.
- Advance the light transport in our OptiX-based renderer improving sampling multi-bounce indirect illumination and overall path tracing fidelity while keeping it tractable for large-scale time-stepped simulation.
- Own and extend physically-based materials through our NVIDIA MDL integration microfacet BRDFs layered and coat materials and correct energy conservation in OptiX closest-hit evaluation.
- Develop our spectral and radiometric pipeline wavelength-dependent sky and material response spectral-to-XYZ-to-RGB conversion and physically-grounded units from scene radiance through to sensor output.
- Push the atmosphere and volumetrics the spectral sky model (Prague Sky Model) volumetric clouds (multi-layer multi-scattering phase functions aerial perspective) participating media and fog.
- Improve camera image formation the GPU ISP (demosaic tone mapping exposure/EV100 auto white balance via correlated color temperature) and physically-based lens and sensor effects such as motion blur rolling shutter lens distortion and sensor noise.
- Design and tune sampling and denoising strategies importance sampling blue-noise and stratified sampling MIS and spatial/temporal denoising that reduce variance without compromising physical accuracy.
- Profile and optimize the per-frame GPU pipeline OptiX launches BVH (GAS/IAS) construction material uploads and denoising to render more geometry and richer materials within budget.
- Contribute to the OpenUSD scene and material pipeline and collaborate with adjacent teams to plumb new lighting weather and sensor parameters end-to-end.
- Uphold high standards through technical design documents code review reference-image regression testing and mentorship of other engineers.
- BS MS or PhD in Computer Science Computer Graphics or equivalent experience.
- 8 years of professional software engineering experience with a substantial portion focused on real-time or physically-based rendering.
- Deep hands-on graphics expertise: physically-based rendering BRDF / microfacet theory Monte Carlo path tracing importance sampling and light transport. You can read a SIGGRAPH paper and turn it into correct performant shader code.
- Strong C skills (modern C17/20) including performance optimization memory management and clean API and system design in a large codebase.
- Significant GPU programming experience CUDA and/or a ray tracing API (OptiX DXR Vulkan RT) with a real understanding of GPU architecture and execution.
- Solid grounding in the math of rendering: linear algebra sampling and probability radiometry and color science.
- Experience profiling and optimizing GPU rendering workloads (e.g. Nsight) on real complex scenes.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills and a track record of driving technical design across teams.
- Experience implementing or extending a production renderer game engine rendering core offline/path-tracing renderer or commercial graphics product.
- Experience with NVIDIA MDL OSL or other physically-based material systems.
- Experience with OptiX specifically or other GPU ray tracing / BVH-based pipelines.
- Spectral rendering atmospheric scattering models (Prague Hosek-Wilkie Bruneton) or volumetric cloud rendering (Schneider/Nubis-style ray marching Hillaire multi-scattering).
- Camera and sensor imaging: ISP pipelines sensor noise modeling lens distortion motion blur rolling shutter exposure and white balance.
- Experience with OpenUSD scene description and asset pipelines.
- Familiarity with ROS and integrating rendering output into robotics / AV data stacks.
- Experience enabling rendering for machine learning workloads synthetic data generation reinforcement learning environments or closed-loop simulation.
- Contributions to open-source rendering graphics or simulation projects or relevant publications.
Compensation
The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paidin accordance withapplicable state laws. The compensation may not be representative for positionslocatedoutside of New York Colorado California or Washington.
The salary range for this role is $160200 to $246300. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.
Bonus Potential: An incentivepayprogram offers payouts based on company performance job level and individual performance.
Benefits
GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs.Benefit options include medical dental vision Health Savings Account Flexible Spending Accounts retirement savings plan sickness and accident benefits life insurance paid vacation & holidays tuitionassistanceprograms employeeassistanceprogram GM vehicle discounts and more.
Company Vehicle
Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review you will be eligible toparticipatein a company vehicle evaluation program through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Note: program participantsare required topurchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.
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Benefits Overview
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We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required where applicable to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more visit How we Hire.
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Required Experience:
Staff IC
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