Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D

Description

The company builds AI tools that make video creation far simpler. Its team works on some of the hardest creative and technical problems in generative media.

The work is about new ways for people to collaborate with AI that can do real creative work alongside them. The stack has three parts: multimodal agents that turn creative direction into edits, rendering engines that layer video and graphics, and video models trained in-house that generate new footage when needed.

The company's creative workspace and its engine, which gives any AI agent native video editing, both draw on this stack. Developers can also use the models through APIs.

This is the founding engineer role for photoreal 3D in the in-house engine, a cross-platform graphics and media renderer written in Rust. The goal is 3D that looks indistinguishable from footage.

The engine already handles video, motion graphics, effects and compositing in a color-managed pipeline. You will bring 3D up to that standard with two modes: a fast interactive preview for editing, and a physically based final render, path-traced or hybrid ray-traced, that produces film-quality frames for export. Both run from one scene, material and lighting model, so the preview matches the export.

Scenes are built by people and by AI agents, so render cost, failure modes and APIs matter as much as image quality. You will make the core architecture decisions and help build the team around them.

Responsibilities

• Design the 3D architecture: split the work between ray tracing, rasterization and denoising, and map it onto Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D and WebGPU.
• Build light transport covering global illumination, reflection and refraction, soft shadows from area lights, and volumetrics such as haze, fog and light shafts.
• Create a physically based system for materials, lights and cameras. Materials must conserve energy, including metal, glass, clearcoat, sheen and translucency. Lights use real-world units. Cameras support exposure, depth of field and motion blur.
• Own image quality across sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising and firefly suppression, so frames stay stable and deterministic through an export.
• Make scenes with millions of triangles and tens of thousands of objects run at production scale, using acceleration structures, instancing, culling and memory management.
• Connect 3D to the video, motion graphics and compositing pipeline, including ACES color management and render passes for depth, normals, motion vectors and light groups.
• Keep render cost predictable and rendering reliable through performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs.
• Design 3D APIs that people and AI agents can both use: a clear scene representation, validation errors that say what to fix, fast previews, and render cost known before a render starts.
• Work with the engine, product and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.

Requirements

• You have built physically based renderers in production, such as film or offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray-traced or hybrid lighting.
• You know light transport well: the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models and denoising.
• You have built and traversed BVHs on the GPU, used hardware ray tracing APIs such as Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing or DXR, and written compute-based fallbacks.
• You understand modern rasterization pipelines and how hybrid renderers combine them with ray tracing.
• You have hands-on experience with Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D or WebGPU, including compute shaders, GPU profiling and GPU debugging.
• You write Rust or C++ and reason carefully about memory, concurrency and performance.
• You have a strong grasp of graphics math: linear algebra, geometry, probability and sampling.
• You can look at a frame, explain why it does not read as real, and fix the cause.
• You have owned complex technical projects and made architecture decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.
• Even better if: you have worked inside a production renderer or engine such as Cycles, Arnold, RenderMan, V-Ray, Karma, Unreal Engine (Lumen or its path tracer) or Unity HDRP.
• Even better if: you have built or integrated ML denoisers, or worked on neural rendering.
• Even better if: you have worked with color management such as ACES or OpenColorIO, HDR output or film-look pipelines.
• Even better if: you have built on cross-platform graphics abstractions such as wgpu, including extending them where features like ray tracing are missing.
• Even better if: you have optimized rendering for Apple silicon or mobile GPUs.
• Even better if: you have Rust experience, video compositing experience, or experience integrating 2D and 3D rendering in creative tools.

Conditions

Most roles require working in person at the New York City headquarters in Union Square.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision plans.
• 401K with employer match.
• Commuter benefits.
• Catered lunch several days a week.
• A dinner stipend every night you work late.
• A Grubhub subscription.
• Health and wellness perks.
• Several team offsites a year, plus team events every month.
• Generous PTO.
• Benefits apply to full-time employees only.