Staff Graphics Engineer, Rendering (Simulation)

About the role

This role is open to a fully remote position or hybrid with one of our offices if preferred. The Compensation section provides a good faith estimate of the salary range for this role, which is $160,200 to $246,300.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

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 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.

Qualifications

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. 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.