Staff Graphics Engineer — Real-Time Rendering for Simulation

General Motors; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 246,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

GM vehicle program

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Staff Graphics Engineer — Rendering (Simulation) to advance the physically-based rendering stack for a sensor simulation platform used in autonomous vehicle development. The role focuses on light transport, materials, atmosphere, and sensor imaging pipelines to deliver spectrally accurate imagery.

You will work with CUDA, OptiX, MDL, and OpenUSD, shaping rendering performance and accuracy while collaborating across teams.

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 in a large codebase.
• 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, radiometry, 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

Responsibilities

• 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, volumetric clouds, participating media, and fog.
• Improve camera image formation — the GPU ISP, demosaic, tone mapping, exposure, white balance, and sensor effects.
• Design and tune sampling and denoising strategies — importance sampling, blue-noise, MIS, 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 to plumb new lighting, weather, and sensor parameters end-to-end.
• Uphold high standards through design docs, code review, regression testing, and mentorship.

Skills

Physically-based rendering

BRDF / microfacet theory

Monte Carlo path tracing

Importance sampling

C++ (modern 17/20)

GPU programming (CUDA/OptiX)

Rendering performance optimization

Mathematics for rendering

Communication & collaboration

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/CG

Tools

CUDA

OptiX

NVIDIA MDL

OpenUSD

ROS

Nsight

Job description

General Motors is seeking a Staff Graphics Engineer — Rendering (Simulation) to advance the physically-based rendering stack for a sensor simulation platform used in autonomous vehicle development. The role focuses on light transport, materials, atmosphere, and sensor imaging pipelines to deliver spectrally accurate imagery.

You will work with CUDA, OptiX, MDL, and OpenUSD, shaping rendering performance and accuracy while collaborating across teams.