Staff Graphics Engineer, Rendering (Simulation)

Staff Graphics Engineer — Rendering (Simulation)

This role is open to a fully remote position or hybrid with one of our offices if preferred. 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.

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.

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. You can read a SIGGRAPH paper and turn it into correct, performant shader code.
• 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.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, and a track record of driving technical design across teams.

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 (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 salary range for this role is $160,200 to $246,300. 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 incentive pay program 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, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.

Company Vehicle

• Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Note: program participants are required to purchase /lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.

GM does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. Do not apply for this role if you will need GM immigration sponsorship now or in the future. This includes direct company sponsorship, entry of GM as the immigration employer of record on a government form, and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (e.g., H1-B, OPT, STEM OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc).