[Hiring] Staff Graphics Engineer, Rendering (Simulation) @General Motors

Role Description

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.

• Render with NVIDIA OptiX and CUDA.
• Evaluate physically-based materials through NVIDIA MDL.
• Produce spectrally-derived, radiometrically-grounded imagery.
• Implement a BRDF from a paper and debug energy loss in a microfacet model.

What You'll Do

• Advance the light transport in our OptiX-based renderer — improving sampling, multi-bounce indirect illumination, and overall path tracing fidelity.
• 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, participating media, and fog.
• Improve camera image formation — GPU ISP, physically-based lens and sensor effects.
• Design and tune sampling and denoising strategies — importance sampling, blue-noise and stratified sampling, MIS, and spatial/temporal denoising.
• Profile and optimize the per-frame GPU pipeline — OptiX launches, BVH construction, material uploads, and denoising.
• Contribute to the OpenUSD scene and material pipeline and collaborate with adjacent teams.
• Uphold high standards through technical design documents, code review, reference-image regression testing, and mentorship of other engineers.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Strong C++ skills (modern C++17/20), including performance optimization, memory management, and clean API and system design.
• Significant GPU programming experience — CUDA and/or a ray tracing API (OptiX, DXR, Vulkan RT).
• 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.
• Movie industry experience background.

Bonus Points

• 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, or volumetric cloud rendering.
• 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.
• Contributions to open-source rendering, graphics, or simulation projects, or relevant publications.

Compensation

• The salary range for this role is $160,200 to $246,300.
• Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance.
• Paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program.
• GM vehicle discounts and more.