Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D

The role

You will be the founding engineer for photoreal 3D in Tesseract, a Rust-based graphics and media rendering engine. You will define the architecture for photoreal 3D and build light transport, physically based models, and image quality systems.

What you will do

• Define the architecture for photoreal 3D including ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising.
• Build light transport including global illumination, reflections, refraction, and volumetrics.
• Build a physically based model for materials, lights and cameras.
• Own image quality including sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising and firefly suppression.
• Scale scenes to production complexity with acceleration structures, instancing, culling and memory management.
• Integrate 3D into Tesseract's video, motion graphics and compositing pipeline.
• Make render cost predictable and rendering robust.
• Design 3D APIs that work for people and AI agents.
• Work with engine, product and AI teams.
• Help hire and grow the 3D rendering team.

Required qualifications

• Deep experience building physically based renderers in production.
• Strong command of light transport: the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models and denoising.
• Hands-on GPU ray tracing: building and traversing acceleration structures (BVHs), hardware ray-tracing APIs such as Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing or DXR, and compute-based fallbacks.
• A solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines, and of 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 the mathematics of graphics: linear algebra, geometry, probability and sampling.
• An eye for realism.
• Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.

Nice to have

• Worked on 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.
• Built or integrated ML denoisers, or worked on neural rendering.
• Worked with color management (ACES, OpenColorIO), HDR output or film-look pipelines.
• Built on cross-platform graphics abstractions such as wgpu.
• Optimized rendering for Apple silicon or mobile GPUs.
• Experience with Rust, video compositing, or integrating 2D and 3D rendering in creative tools.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• 401K with employer match
• Commuter Benefits
• Catered lunch multiple days per week
• Dinner stipend every night if you're working late and want a bite!
• Grubhub subscription
• Health & Wellness Perks
• Multiple team offsites per year with team events every month
• Generous PTO policy

About the company

Mirage is an AI video company focused on making creation dramatically easier. They build multimodal agents, rendering engines, and generative video models used in their flagship creative workspace, Captions.