Senior / Staff Technical Artist – Materials, Lighting & Procedural Environments

General Motors • Sunnyvale, CA

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About The Position

We believe in improving people’s lives by making transportation safer, more accessible, and more convenient. We’re building advanced software and simulation technology to power autonomous vehicles that safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about. We seek and embrace diversity in all of its forms. We continuously push ourselves to think differently and take ownership wherever it's needed. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed. If you share our passion for achieving what some say is impossible, join us. The Role We’re looking for a Senior / Staff Technical Artist who sits at the intersection of materials, lighting, and procedural environment generation. You’ll define practical workflows and tools that let artists author high‑quality, performant content, and you’ll partner with rendering, ML, and perception teams to make sure it behaves as expected in our AV stack.

Requirements

• 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) experience as a Technical Artist, Technical Director, or similar hybrid role in games, VFX, animation, or simulation.
• A strong reel or portfolio demonstrating materials/shading, lighting, and procedural environment work, with clear notes on your personal contribution.
• Deep understanding of physically‑based rendering (PBR), BRDFs, texture workflows, and how to author materials that hold up under varied lighting and exposure.
• Production experience building or maintaining lighting pipelines in a real‑time or near‑real‑time engine (Unreal, Unity, proprietary, etc.), including performance profiling and optimization.
• Familiarity with authoring shaders in MDL, HLSL/GLSL, shader graphs, or similar systems.
• 3+ years working with Houdini or equivalent procedural tools to generate environments, layouts, or set dressing at scale.
• Solid 3D math fundamentals and comfort expressing them in node graphs and code (e.g., for scattering, LOD rules, masking, and terrain‑aware placement).
• Strong Python skills for building pipeline tools, exporters, validators, and DCC integrations; experience with PySide/PyQt or similar UI frameworks is a plus.
• Experience integrating DCC tools (Maya, Houdini, Substance, etc.) with game/simulation engines and asset management systems.
• Ability to profile and debug performance issues related to materials, lighting, and environment complexity, and to communicate findings clearly to both artists and engineers.
• Comfortable owning problems end‑to‑end—from talking to artists, to sketching designs, to shipping tools, to iterating based on feedback.
• Strong communication skills and a track record of bridging art and engineering, especially when priorities conflict or trade‑offs are required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building FX / VFX such as atmospherics, weather, particles, decals, or post‑processing that interact well with your lighting and material pipelines.
• Experience with USD and/or MDL in production pipelines.
• Background generating synthetic data for machine learning or perception, or calibrating content to match real‑world cameras, sensors, or photogrammetry captures.
• Familiarity with ray‑traced or path‑traced real‑time rendering, and techniques for keeping such content scalable in a large simulation environment.
• Experience working in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety‑critical simulation domains.

Responsibilities

• Material & shading pipeline Design and maintain a physically‑based material pipeline for our simulation engines (e.g., MDL, shader graphs, or equivalent).
• Author and calibrate high‑quality shaders and materials that respond correctly under a wide range of lighting conditions and camera models.
• Standardize material libraries, authoring conventions, and validation workflows to keep content consistent and performant.
• Lighting & rendering Define best practices for environment and hero lighting in simulation scenes, including sky/atmospherics, time‑of‑day setups, and camera‑accurate exposure.
• Build in‑engine lighting tools and evaluation scenes to help artists quickly assess quality, realism, and performance.
• Partner with rendering engineers to profile lighting and shading, and to ship optimizations that reduce cost without sacrificing critical visual cues.
• Procedural environment generation & placement Build procedural systems to populate large‑scale environments with buildings, vegetation, traffic control devices, road debris, and other set dressing.
• Develop procedural tools and workflows for generating layouts (streets, landscaping, prop distributions) that respect design, performance, and simulation constraints.
• Collaborate with worldbuilding and content teams to encode art direction and AV testing needs into controllable procedural parameters.
• Cross-functional collaboration Partner with Simulation, ML, and Perception teams to understand what “realism” means from a sensor and model‑performance perspective, and tune your work accordingly.
• Document standards, share best practices, and mentor other artists and technical artists on shading, lighting, and procedural workflows.

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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed