Staff 3D Content Pipeline Engineer

Description
The Role:
Are you a creative and technical problem-solver with a passion for 3D graphics? Join our team of talented engineers and artists to build high-fidelity simulations that will be instrumental in developing safe and reliable self-driving cars.
This role offers the rare opportunity to bridge the gap between artistic vision and engineering rigor. You'll work on complex, large-scale virtual environments, addressing critical fidelity and performance challenges that directly impact the safety and reliability of autonomous vehicles. Collaborate within a highly interdisciplinary team of world-class Artists, Engineers, and Research Scientists to redefine the boundaries of simulation technology, and create innovative tools, pipelines, and workflows for artists.
What you'll do:

• 3D Asset Pipeline Development: Lead the development of a cutting-edge asset generation pipeline for our new real-time, GPU-based ray tracing engine, defining the foundational standards and conventions that will drive future advancements in photorealistic simulation.
• Content Authoring Tools: Integrate external Digital Content Creation tools such as Maya and Unreal Editor with our simulation and rendering stack. Build workflows to author assets for our USD based renderer.
• Rendering Optimization: Architect and implement advanced content authoring strategies to significantly reduce cloud compute costs, leveraging state-of-the-art techniques in geometry, material, shader, and texture optimization to achieve optimal performance.
• Performance Monitoring: Develop systems to validate and monitor asset fidelity and performance, actively analyzing realism perceived by computer vision models.
• Scripting and Automation: Develop tools and scripting APIs to automate the creation and management of assets.
• Tool Development: Assist artists and engineers via tool development, concept testing of new ideas, and building rapid prototypes.
• Collaboration: Work closely with engineers, designers, and researchers to understand testing requirements and translate them into effective simulation environments. Work hand in hand with Cruise Machine Learning Engineers to develop simulations that best test and train our ML Models.
• Quality Assurance: Provide front-line production support across multiple disciplines, troubleshoot assets and scenarios, and help artists with problem-solving. Triage and redirect problems to appropriate engineering teams.

Your Skills and Abilities:

• 5+ years experience as a technical artist (or equivalent capacity) in visual effects, animation, simulators, 3D games, or other high-performance systems.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, specifically with a concentration or focus in Computer Graphics
• Proven experience creating Python scripts to streamline content creation
• Experience with C++ for performance critical engineering and software application development
• Strong 3D content pipeline knowledge with a deep understanding of modeling, texturing, animation, and lighting.
• Proficient with profiling tools to diagnose performance issues and identify how to optimize scenes.
• In-depth knowledge of real-time rendering including physically-based rendering (PBR) pipelines, shader authoring in MDL (or similar shader language) or shader graphs as well as shader performance profiling and optimization.

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge:

• Demonstrated experience in generating high-quality synthetic data for machine learning model training and validation, with an understanding of its critical role in autonomous system development
• NVidia Optix, MDL, and USD experience is highly desirable
• Film or VFX Studio tools or Pipeline Engineer experience.
• Unreal Engine 4 experience with blueprints and material editor
• Maya experience
• A portfolio or reel, including a detailed breakdown of your work in each section.

Compensation:

• The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paid in accordance with applicable state laws. The compensation may not be representative for positions located outside of New York, Colorado, California, or Washington.
• The salary range for this role is ($160,200 and $246,300). The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.
• Benefits: GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.

This role is based remotely, but if the selected candidate lives within a specific mile radius of a GM hub, they will be expected to report to the location three times a week {or other frequency dictated by your manager}.
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.
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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.
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