Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D
$175k - $300k • Union Square, New York City • FullTime
Posted 16h ago
About the job
Mirage is an AI video company focused on making creation dramatically easier by tackling complex challenges in generative media. We are building multimodal agents that transform creative direction into edits, rendering engines that composite video and graphics, and generative video models. Our flagship creative workspace is Captions, powered by our Tesseract engine which provides AI agents with native video-editing capabilities and offers APIs for developers to integrate our models into their products.
Responsibilities
- Define the architecture for photoreal 3D rendering, including the division of work between ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising, and their mapping onto graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, and WebGPU.
- Develop light transport features such as global illumination, reflections, refraction, soft shadows, and volumetrics.
- Build a physically based model for materials, lights, and cameras, ensuring energy conservation and realistic camera effects.
- Own and ensure image quality through sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising, and firefly suppression, maintaining stability and determinism across video exports.
- Scale scenes to production complexity using acceleration structures, instancing, culling, and memory management for large numbers of triangles and objects.
- Integrate 3D rendering into Tesseract's existing video, motion graphics, and compositing pipeline, including ACES color management and render passes.
- Make render cost predictable and rendering robust through performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs.
- Design 3D APIs that are user-friendly for both humans and AI agents, featuring a clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews, and predictable render costs.
- Collaborate with engine, product, and AI teams, and contribute to hiring and growing the 3D rendering team.
Requirements
- Deep experience building physically based renderers in production environments (film, offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray tracing).
- Strong command of light transport principles, including the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models, and denoising.
- Hands-on experience with GPU ray tracing, including building and traversing acceleration structures (BVHs) and using hardware ray-tracing APIs (Metal, Vulkan, DXR) or compute-based fallbacks.
- Solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines and how hybrid renderers combine rasterization with ray tracing.
- Hands-on experience with graphics APIs like Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, or WebGPU, including compute shaders, GPU profiling, and debugging.
- Proficiency in Rust or C++ with strong reasoning about memory, concurrency, and performance.
- Strong foundational knowledge in the mathematics of graphics, including linear algebra, geometry, probability, and sampling.
- An eye for realism and the ability to identify and fix causes of non-realistic image output.
- Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
- 401K with employer match
- Commuter Benefits
- Catered lunch