Founding Rendering Engineer, Photoreal 3D

Mirage•New York, NY

1d•$175,000 - $300,000

About The Position

Mirage is hiring a founding engineer to build photorealistic 3D rendering for Tesseract, its Rust-based, cross-platform graphics and media rendering engine. The role will establish the architecture for interactive editing previews and physically based final renders, using a shared scene, material, and lighting model so that previews match exported results. The goal is to produce film-quality frames through path tracing or hybrid ray tracing while supporting scenes authored by both people and AI agents, with attention to render cost, failure modes, and usable APIs. The engineer will define how ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising work together across graphics platforms; develop light transport and physically based materials, lights, and cameras; and own image quality, performance, scene scaling, and robustness. The role also integrates 3D into Tesseract's existing video, motion graphics, compositing, and color-managed pipeline, and designs APIs and validation that work for human creators and AI agents. The position involves close collaboration with engine, product, and AI teams, and helping hire and grow the 3D rendering team. Most roles require in-person work at Mirage's New York City headquarters in Union Square.

Requirements

Deep experience building physically based renderers in production, such as film or offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray-traced or hybrid lighting.
Strong command of light transport, including the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models, and denoising.
Hands-on GPU ray-tracing experience, including building and traversing acceleration structures such as BVHs, using hardware ray-tracing APIs such as Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing, or DXR, and implementing compute-based fallbacks.
Solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines and 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 graphics mathematics, including linear algebra, geometry, probability, and sampling.
Ability to assess why an image does not look realistic and identify and fix the cause.
Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.

Nice To Haves

Experience with 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.
Experience building or integrating ML denoisers or working on neural rendering.
Experience with color management such as ACES or OpenColorIO, HDR output, or film-look pipelines.
Experience building on cross-platform graphics abstractions such as wgpu, including extending them where features such as ray tracing are lacking.
Experience optimizing rendering for Apple silicon or mobile GPUs.
Experience with Rust, video compositing, or integrating 2D and 3D rendering in creative tools.

Responsibilities

Define the architecture for photorealistic 3D rendering, including how ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising divide the work and map to Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, and WebGPU.
Build light transport capabilities, including global illumination, reflections, refraction, soft shadows from area lights, and volumetrics such as haze, fog, and light shafts.
Develop physically based models for materials, lights, and cameras, including energy-conserving materials, real-world light units, exposure, depth of field, and motion blur.
Own image quality through sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising, and firefly suppression, ensuring stable and deterministic frames across video exports.
Scale scenes to production complexity using 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 costs predictable and rendering robust through performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs.
Design 3D APIs for people and AI agents, including clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews, and render-cost estimates before rendering.
Work with engine, product, and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.