Senior Rendering Engineer (Robotics)

Location: Onsite in the San Francisco Bay Area, United States

Salary: $250,000–$400,000 base salary plus meaningful equity

Company

Early-stage robotics company building integrated hardware and software systems for autonomous manufacturing, including robotics, simulation, perception, rendering, and GPU performance.

What you will do

• Build high-fidelity real-time rendering systems for complex simulated environments.
• Develop physically based lighting, shading, and material systems grounded in optics and light transport.
• Implement and improve ray tracing, global illumination, shadows, sampling, denoising, and visibility techniques.
• Profile and optimize GPU rendering workloads across memory, bandwidth, cache behavior, occupancy, parallelism, and synchronization.
• Write performance-critical C++ and low-level GPU and shader code.
• Collaborate with simulation, perception, robotics, and GPU engineers while owning rendering problems from mathematical foundations through implementation and optimization.

Requirements

• Deep experience building or owning core rendering systems in AAA games, cinematic rendering, advanced graphics R&D, or another demanding real-time graphics environment.
• Strong C++ skills and hands-on experience with Vulkan, DirectX, CUDA, HLSL, or GLSL.
• Strong understanding of physically based rendering, lighting, image formation, mathematics, and physics.
• Experience with BRDFs/BSDFs, global illumination, ray or path tracing, sampling, denoising, shading, or visibility.
• Evidence of personally optimizing GPU rendering workloads and improving frame time, latency, or visual quality.
• Ability to reason from rendering algorithms to their behavior on underlying GPU hardware.

Nice to have

• Experience building custom renderers, graphics engines, ray tracers, or rendering infrastructure from the ground up.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, highly technical team spanning robotics, simulation, graphics, perception, and GPU systems.
• Significant freedom to make architectural decisions and push rendering technology beyond conventional engine constraints.
• Highly competitive base salary and meaningful equity.