Job Description

We believe in improving peoples lives by making transportation safer more accessible and more convenient. Were building advanced software and simulation technology to power autonomous vehicles that safely connect people to the places things and experiences they care about.

We seek and embrace diversity in all of its forms. We continuously push ourselves to think differently and take ownership wherever its needed. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed. If you share our passion for achieving what some say is impossible join us.

The Role

Werelooking for aSenior / Staff Technical Artistwho sits at the intersection ofmaterials lighting and procedural environment generation.Youlldefine practical workflows and tools that let artists author highquality performant content andyoullpartner with rendering ML andperceptionteams to make sure it behaves as expected in our AV stack.

What Youll Do

• Material & shading pipeline

  • Design and maintain a physicallybased material pipeline for our simulation engines (e.g. MDL shader graphs or equivalent).

  • Author and calibrate highquality shaders and materials that respond correctly under a wide range of lighting conditions and camera models.

  • Standardize material libraries authoring conventions and validation workflows to keep content consistent and performant.

• Lighting & rendering

  • Define best practices for environment and hero lighting in simulation scenes including sky/atmospherics timeofday setups and cameraaccurate exposure.

  • Build inengine lighting tools and evaluation scenes to help artists quickly assess quality realism and performance.

  • Partner with rendering engineers to profile lighting and shading and to ship optimizations that reduce cost without sacrificing critical visual cues.

• Procedural environment generation & placement

  • Build procedural systems to populate largescale environments with buildings vegetation traffic control devices road debris and other set dressing.

  • Develop procedural tools and workflows for generating layouts (streets landscaping prop distributions) that respect design performance and simulation constraints.

  • Collaborate with worldbuilding and content teams to encode art direction and AV testing needs into controllable procedural parameters.

• Cross-functional collaboration

  • Partner with Simulation ML and Perception teams to understand what realism means from a sensor and modelperformance perspective and tune your work accordingly.

  • Document standards share best practices and mentor other artists and technical artists on shading lighting and procedural workflows.

Your Skills & Abilities

• Experience

  • 5 years (Senior) or 8 years (Staff) experience as a Technical Artist Technical Director or similar hybrid role in games VFX animation or simulation.

  • A strong reel or portfolio demonstrating materials/shading lighting and procedural environment work with clear notes on your personal contribution.

• Materials & lighting

  • Deep understanding of physicallybased rendering (PBR) BRDFs texture workflows and how to author materials that hold up under varied lighting and exposure.

  • Production experience building or maintaining lighting pipelines in a realtime or nearrealtime engine (Unreal Unity proprietary etc.) including performance profiling and optimization.

  • Familiarity with authoring shaders in MDL HLSL/GLSL shader graphs or similar systems.

• Procedural workflows

  • 3 years working with Houdini or equivalent procedural tools to generate environments layouts or set dressing at scale.

  • Solid 3D math fundamentals and comfort expressing them in node graphs and code (e.g. for scattering LOD rules masking and terrainaware placement).

• Tools & engineering skills

  • Strong Python skills for building pipeline tools exporters validators and DCC integrations; experience with PySide/PyQt or similar UI frameworks is a plus.

  • Experience integrating DCC tools (Maya Houdini Substance etc.) with game/simulation engines and asset management systems.

  • Ability to profile and debug performance issues related to materials lighting and environment complexity and to communicate findings clearly to both artists and engineers.

• Mindset

  • Comfortable owning problems endtoendfrom talking to artists to sketching designs to shipping tools to iterating based on feedback.

  • Strong communication skills and a track record of bridging art and engineering especially when priorities conflict or tradeoffs are required.

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge

• Experience building FX / VFX such as atmospherics weather particles decals or postprocessing that interact well with your lighting and material pipelines.

• Experience with USD and/or MDL in production pipelines.

• Background generating synthetic data for machine learning or perception or calibrating content to match realworld cameras sensors or photogrammetry captures.

• Familiarity with raytraced or pathtraced realtime rendering and techniques for keeping such content scalable in a large simulation environment.

• Experience working in autonomous vehicles robotics or other safetycritical simulation domains.

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 were looking out for your well-beingat work and at homeso 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 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.