Spectral Motion Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Description

• Work on real, hard rendering problems - light transport, physically-based materials, atmospheric and volumetric scattering, and sensor image formation - where physical correctness is the product.
• Own meaningful surface area: the sky/atmosphere system, the materials pipeline, the camera imaging pipeline, or the core ray tracing path, depending on your strengths.
• Influence the technical direction of a rendering platform used across the organization for perception training, closed-loop simulation, and reinforcement learning.
• Join a team that values rigor - papers, derivations, reference comparisons, and pixel-level regression testing - alongside pragmatic engineering.
  

• Advance the light transport in our OptiX-based renderer - improving sampling, multi-bounce indirect illumination, and overall path tracing fidelity while keeping it tractable for large-scale, time-stepped simulation.
• Own and extend physically-based materials through our NVIDIA MDL integration - microfacet BRDFs, layered and coat materials, and correct energy conservation in OptiX closest-hit evaluation.
• Develop our spectral and radiometric pipeline - wavelength-dependent sky and material response, spectral-to-XYZ-to-RGB conversion, and physically-grounded units from scene radiance through to sensor output.
• Push the atmosphere and volumetrics - the spectral sky model (Prague Sky Model), volumetric clouds (multi-layer, multi-scattering, phase functions, aerial perspective), participating media, and fog.
• Improve camera image formation - the GPU ISP (demosaic, tone mapping, exposure/EV100, auto white balance via correlated color temperature), and physically-based lens and sensor effects such as motion blur, rolling shutter, lens distortion, and sensor noise.
• Design and tune sampling and denoising strategies - importance sampling, blue-noise and stratified sampling, MIS, and spatial/temporal denoising that reduce variance without compromising physical accuracy.
• Profile and optimize the per-frame GPU pipeline - OptiX launches, BVH (GAS/IAS) construction, material uploads, and denoising - to render more geometry and richer materials within budget.
• Contribute to the OpenUSD scene and material pipeline and collaborate with adjacent teams to plumb new lighting, weather, and sensor parameters end-to-end.
• Uphold high standards through technical design documents, code review, reference-image regression testing, and mentorship of other engineers.
  

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Graphics, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a substantial portion focused on real-time or physically-based rendering.
• Deep, hands-on graphics expertise: physically-based rendering, BRDF / microfacet theory, Monte Carlo path tracing, importance sampling, and light transport. You can read a SIGGRAPH paper and turn it into correct, performant shader code.
• Strong C++ skills (modern C++17/20), including performance optimization, memory management, and clean API and system design in a large codebase.
• Significant GPU programming experience - CUDA and/or a ray tracing API (OptiX, DXR, Vulkan RT) - with a real understanding of GPU architecture and execution.
• Solid grounding in the math of rendering: linear algebra, sampling and probability, radiometry, and color science.
• Experience profiling and optimizing GPU rendering workloads (e.g., Nsight) on real, complex scenes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, and a track record of driving technical design across teams.
• Movie industry experience background
  

• Experience implementing or extending a production renderer, game engine rendering core, offline/path-tracing renderer, or commercial graphics product.
• Experience with NVIDIA MDL, OSL, or other physically-based material systems.
• Experience with OptiX specifically, or other GPU ray tracing / BVH-based pipelines.
• Spectral rendering, atmospheric scattering models (Prague, Hosek-Wilkie, Bruneton), or volumetric cloud rendering (Schneider/Nubis-style ray marching, Hillaire multi-scattering).
• Camera and sensor imaging: ISP pipelines, sensor noise modeling, lens distortion, motion blur, rolling shutter, exposure and white balance.
• Experience with OpenUSD scene description and asset pipelines.
• Familiarity with ROS and integrating rendering output into robotics / AV data stacks.
• Experience enabling rendering for machine learning workloads - synthetic data generation, reinforcement learning environments, or closed-loop simulation.
• Contributions to open-source rendering, graphics, or simulation projects, or relevant publications.

About GM

Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.

Why Join Us

We believe we all must make a choice every day - individually and collectively - to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.

Benefits Overview

From day one, we're looking out for your well-being-at work and at home-so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.

Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)

General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers.

All employment decisions are made on a non-discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws.

We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.

Accommodations

General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us or call us at 1-800-865-7580. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.