Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D

Mirage•New York, NY

6d•$175,000 - $300,000•Onsite

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 core architecture for a fast interactive editing preview and a physically based final renderer—path-traced or hybrid ray-traced—using a shared scene, material, and lighting model so that previews match exported footage. The engineer will make foundational technical decisions, build rendering capabilities and production-scale infrastructure, and design APIs suitable for both people and AI agents. The work includes balancing image quality, predictable render cost, robustness, and performance, while integrating 3D with Tesseract’s existing video, motion graphics, effects, and compositing pipeline. The engineer will collaborate with engine, product, and AI teams and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team. Most roles require in-person work at Mirage’s New York City headquarters in Union Square. Benefits listed apply to full-time employees only.

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 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, including how ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising divide the work and how the architecture maps to Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, and WebGPU.
Build light-transport features, including global illumination, reflections, 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, including energy-conserving materials, real-world light units, and camera exposure, depth of field, and motion blur.
Own image quality through sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising, and firefly suppression, maintaining 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 cost 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 a clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews, and render costs known before rendering.
Work with engine, product, and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.
Make core architectural decisions for the photoreal 3D rendering system and help build the team around it.