Senior Rendering Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent seeks a Senior Rendering Engineer to own demanding real-time rendering. You will design and implement high‑fidelity rendering for autonomous robotics environments, pushing visual quality while maintaining performance on modern GPUs.

You’ll work across optics-based lighting, BRDFs, and integration with simulation and perception teams. This hands-on role emphasizes low-level code in C++ and shader pipelines for a tightly integrated graphics stack.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building or owning core rendering systems in demanding real-time graphics environments.

Responsibilities

• Build high-fidelity real-time rendering systems for complex simulated environments.
• Develop physically based lighting, shading and material systems grounded in real optics and light transport.
• Profile and optimize rendering workloads directly on the GPU to push performance and visual quality.
• Analyze rendering algorithms and hardware behavior to understand bottlenecks (memory, bandwidth, cache, occupancy).
• Implement techniques across ray tracing, global illumination, shadows, sampling and denoising.

Skills

C++

Real-time rendering

GPU optimization

Vulkan

DirectX

CUDA

HLSL/GLSL

Ray tracing

Tools

Vulkan

DirectX

CUDA

HLSL/GLSL

Job description

Senior Rendering Engineer

Onsite, Bay Area

I’m working with an early-stage robotics company building a deeply integrated hardware and software stack across robotics, simulation, perception, rendering and GPU performance.

The company is building highly autonomous manufacturing systems from the ground up, with a major focus on creating extremely high-fidelity simulated environments that can support advanced robotics and physical AI.

This is a highly technical rendering role for someone who has gone deep into real-time graphics, physically based rendering and GPU performance, rather than simply working with an existing engine at a high level.

You’ll work on:

• Building high-fidelity real-time rendering systems for complex simulated environments
• Developing physically based lighting, shading and material systems grounded in real optics and light transport
• Profiling and optimizing rendering workloads directly on the GPU to push performance and visual quality
• Working across rendering algorithms and hardware behaviour to understand bottlenecks around memory, bandwidth, cache behaviour, occupancy and execution
• Building and improving techniques across ray tracing, global illumination, shadows, sampling, denoising and visibility
• Writing performance-critical graphics code in C++ alongside low-level GPU and shader code
• Working closely with simulation, perception, robotics and GPU engineers to build a tightly integrated graphics stack rather than an isolated game renderer
• Owning rendering problems end to end, from mathematical and physical foundations through implementation, profiling and optimization

Requirements:

• Deep experience building or owning core rendering systems in AAA games, cinematic rendering, advanced graphics R&D or another demanding real-time graphics environment
• Strong C++ and hands-on experience with low-level graphics technologies such as Vulkan, DirectX, CUDA, HLSL or GLSL
• Strong understanding of physically based rendering, lighting and the underlying mathematics and physics of image formation
• Experience with areas such as BRDF/BSDFs, global illumination, ray/path tracing, sampling, denoising, shading or visibility
• Evidence of personally optimizing GPU rendering workloads and delivering meaningful frame-time, latency or visual-quality improvements
• Ability to reason from a rendering algorithm all the way down to how it behaves on the underlying GPU hardware
• Strong understanding of GPU performance characteristics including memory access, bandwidth, cache behaviour, parallelism and synchronization
• Experience building custom renderers, graphics engines, ray tracers or rendering infrastructure from the ground up is particularly valuable.

You’ll join a small, highly technical team working across robotics, simulation, graphics, perception and GPU systems, with significant freedom to make architectural decisions and push rendering technology beyond conventional engine constraints.

The environment is extremely hands-on. They’re looking for someone who wants to build the renderer, understand the physics behind it, and then make it run extremely fast on modern GPUs.

Package: Highly competitive base salary plus meaningful equity.