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Mirage is an AI video company building Captions, a creative workspace for generating, editing, and designing video. Tesseract is their Rust-based, cross-platform graphics and media rendering engine that powers video, motion graphics, effects and compositing. You will be the founding engineer for photoreal 3D rendering in Tesseract, responsible for building a 3D system that produces film-quality output indistinguishable from real footage.
You will define the core architecture for photoreal 3D rendering, deciding how ray tracing, rasterization, and denoising divide the work across Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, and WebGPU. Key responsibilities include building light transport (global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows, volumetrics), implementing physically based material and lighting models (energy-conserving materials, real-world unit lights, cameras with exposure and depth of field), and owning image quality through sampling, antialiasing, denoising, and firefly suppression with stable, deterministic frames across video exports.
You will scale scenes to production complexity with acceleration structures, instancing, culling, and memory management for millions of triangles. Integration work includes compositing 3D into Tesseract's existing video pipeline with ACES color management and render passes (depth, normals, motion vectors, light groups). You'll make rendering cost predictable through performance budgeting and profiling, design 3D APIs that work for both people and AI agents, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team. This is a foundational architectural role at a well-funded AI video company backed by top-tier investors including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Deep production experience building physically based renderers: film/offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray-traced or hybrid lighting
- Strong command of light transport: rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models, denoising
- Hands-on GPU ray tracing: building/traversing acceleration structures (BVHs), hardware ray-tracing APIs (Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing, DXR), compute-based fallbacks
- Solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines and hybrid renderers combining rasterization with ray tracing
- Hands-on experience with Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D, or WebGPU including compute shaders, GPU profiling, GPU debugging
- Proficiency in Rust or C++ with strong reasoning about memory, concurrency, performance
- Strong foundations in graphics mathematics: linear algebra, geometry, probability, sampling
- Eye for realism: ability to identify why frames don't read as real and fix root causes
- Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous spaces
PLUS (preferred):
- Internals experience with production renderers/engines: Cycles, Arnold, RenderMan, V-Ray, Karma, Unreal Engine (Lumen/path tracer), Unity HDRP
- Built or integrated ML denoisers or worked on neural rendering
- Color management (ACES, OpenColorIO), HDR output, film-look pipelines
- Cross-platform graphics abstractions (wgpu) including extending for ray tracing
- Rendering optimization for Apple silicon or mobile GPUs
- Rust, video compositing, or 2D/3D rendering integration in creative tools
