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Staff Graphics Engineer, Rendering (Simulation)
General MotorsUnited StatesRemotefull_timeVerifiedPosted 14 Aug 2026
💰 $246,300/yr($160,200/yr – $246,300/yr)
About the role
Job Description
Staff Graphics Engineer — Rendering (Simulation)
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. We're 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?
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. We're 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.
What You'll Do
- 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.
What You Must Have
- 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.
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