Software Engineer, 3D Rendering

Mirage; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Mirage is seeking a founding engineer for photoreal 3D in Tesseract, our Rust-based rendering engine. You will shape core architecture for ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising, delivering fast previews and film-quality final renders from scenes authored by humans and AI agents.

You will own light transport, materials, cameras, and image quality, while collaborating with engine, product, and AI teams to hire and grow the 3D rendering group, in NYC HQ where in-person work is expected.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building physically based renderers in production.
• Strong command of light transport and Monte Carlo methods.
• Hands-on GPU ray tracing and acceleration structures (BVHs).
• Knowledge of modern rasterization and hybrid renderers.
• Proficiency in Rust or C++, with memory and performance discipline.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture for photoreal 3D rendering across ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising.
• Build light transport and physically based material models.
• Own image quality: sampling, antialiasing, denoising, and stable frames for video export.
• Scale scenes with acceleration structures for high complexity.
• Integrate 3D into Tesseract's video and compositing pipeline; manage color workflows.

Skills

Physically based rendering

GPU ray tracing

Rust or C++

Ray tracing theory

3D graphics math

Tools

Metal

Vulkan

Direct3D

WebGPU

Job description

Mirage is an AI video company focused on making creation dramatically easier. Our team tackles some of the hardest creative and technical challenges in generative media. We get to rethink how people collaborate with AI that can actually do creative work with them—defining entirely new interaction paradigms for AI-native video tools. We make that possible by building multimodal agents that turn creative direction into edits, rendering engines that composite multiple layers of video and graphics, and generative video models trained from the ground up that create new media when needed. All of this comes together in Captions, our creative workspace for generating, editing, and designing video. The technology behind Captions is now available more broadly: Tesseract gives any AI agent native video-editing capabilities, while developers can integrate our models into their own products through APIs. Explore our work Captions https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captions-ai-edits-your-video/id1541407007 Our flagship creative workspace Tesseract https://x.com/trymirage/status/2102429594804429138 Our professional video engine for AI agents Research https://mirage.app/research?utm_source=chatgpt.com The foundation models we build in-house Updates https://x.com/trymirage The latest from Mirage TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/24/mirage-raises-75m-to-continue-building-models-for-its-ai-video-editing-app-captions/, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/companies/captions/?list=ai50, Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/91270234/video-most-innovative-companies-fast-company-2025-youtube-roku-tubi-vimeo-captions-descript-cour-procreate-synthesia-beeble Press Our Investors We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, and more. Please note that most of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square).

About the role

We want Tesseract https://mirage.app/tesseract to render 3D that is indistinguishable from footage. You'll be the founding engineer for photoreal 3D in Tesseract, our Rust-based, cross-platform graphics and media rendering engine. Tesseract already renders video, motion graphics, effects and compositing in a color- managed pipeline. You'll build 3D to the same standard: a fast interactive preview for editing, and a physically based final render, path-traced or hybrid ray-traced, that produces film-quality frames for export. Both run from one scene, material and lighting model, so what people see while they edit is what they export. Scenes are authored by people and by AI agents, so render cost, failure modes and APIs matter as much as image quality. This is a foundational role: you'll make the core architectural decisions and help build the team around them.

What you'll do

• Define the architecture for photoreal 3D: how ray tracing, rasterization and denoising divide the work, and how that maps onto Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D and WebGPU.
• Build light transport: global illumination, reflections and refraction, soft shadows from area lights, and volumetrics such as haze, fog and light shafts.
• Build a physically based model for materials, lights and cameras: energy-conserving materials (metal, glass, clearcoat, sheen, translucency), lights in real-world units, and a camera with exposure, depth of field and motion blur.
• Own image quality: sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising and firefly suppression, with frames that stay stable and deterministic across a video export.
• Scale scenes to production complexity with acceleration structures, instancing, culling and memory management, for millions of triangles and tens of thousands of objects.
• Integrate 3D into Tesseract's video, motion graphics and compositing pipeline, including ACES color management and render passes such as depth, normals, motion vectors and light groups.
• Make render cost predictable and rendering robust: performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs.
• Design 3D APIs that work for people and AI agents alike: a clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews and render cost known before the render.
• Work with engine, product and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.

What makes you a great fit

• Deep experience building physically based renderers in production: film or offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray-traced or hybrid lighting.
• Strong command of light transport: the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models and denoising.
• Hands-on GPU ray tracing: building and traversing acceleration structures (BVHs), hardware ray-tracing APIs such as Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing or DXR, and compute-based fallbacks.
• A solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines, and of how hybrid renderers combine rasterization with ray tracing.
• Hands-on experience with Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D or WebGPU, including compute shaders, GPU profiling and GPU debugging.
• Proficiency in Rust or C++, with strong reasoning about memory, concurrency and performance.
• Strong foundations in the mathematics of graphics: linear algebra, geometry, probability and sampling.
• An eye for realism: you can look at a frame, say why it doesn't read as real, and fix the cause.
• Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.

Even better if

• You've worked on the internals of a production renderer or engine such as Cycles, Arnold, RenderMan, V-Ray, Karma, Unreal Engine (Lumen or its path tracer) or Unity HDRP.
• You've built or integrated ML denoisers, or worked on neural rendering.
• You've worked with co