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Salary: USD 260,000 - 290,000 / annual
VSCO is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to own Reflex, the company's production GPU image-processing engine, and lead its integration into Studio Pro on iOS and macOS. This is a critical technical leadership role focused on deepening an imaging stack already in customers' hands.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the Reflex imaging engine: DAG execution, WGSL operators, GPU resource and memory budgets, and color management (linear working space, LUTs, Display P3, bit-depth)
- Shipping engine changes through native bridges (UniFFI + Nitro) into Studio Pro on iOS and macOS, including versioning and release management
- Taking new imaging capabilities from design to production, including RAW develop, tiled/gigapixel export, and parity with existing VSCO imaging stacks
- Diagnosing and fixing production-class mobile graphics problems: out-of-memory errors, cache eviction, HEIC encoding, and optimizing editor vs. batch vs. export paths
- Defining and maintaining render/pipeline contracts in the shared Studio Pro core to keep mobile and desktop implementations coherent
- Mentoring Senior engineers toward Staff-level ownership and raising the quality of design and code review across the organization
- Leading force-multiplication initiatives: better native packaging and CI, shared review/agent workflows, and AI tools that accelerate development cycles
- Partnering with Product, Design, and Engineering to translate product and business goals into technical direction, making pragmatic tradeoffs between long-term architecture and delivering value to customers
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years in engineering with a proven track record owning a production rendering, imaging, or GPU-compute system
- Deep GPU/rendering experience: pipelines, shaders, color management, and memory optimization—not just API familiarity
- Strong systems language experience; Rust strongly preferred. Comfortable reading and writing shaders (WGSL, Metal, or equivalent)
- Experience bringing imaging or graphics work to mobile platforms (memory budgets, decode/encode, thermal/GPU limits). iOS/Metal preferred
- Experience working 0→1 inside an existing product: evaluating nascent ideas, identifying high-leverage work, and sequencing small investments into sizable change
- Experience mentoring other Senior engineers to grow into Staff-level leaders
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted developer workflows (parallel agents, MCP, eval/review automation) that you have actually shipped in a team
Nice-to-have skills: wgpu, WebGPU, WASM, native bridges (UniFFI, JNI, Nitro), React Native, photographic imaging (RAW, color management, LUTs, film emulation), on-device or cloud ML in creative-tools contexts.
