Principal Technical Artist

Job description

## About the Role Before an autonomous vehicle navigates a busy intersection, before a robot learns to pick and place in a warehouse, before any Physical AI system is trusted in the real world, it has to prove itself in ours. Parallel Domain builds the platform that validates the next generation of autonomous systems in high-fidelity virtual environments. Our content and rendering pipeline is how that platform earns its credibility with customers. The virtual environments we build have to hold up under physical, geometric, and sensor-level scrutiny—they are the testbeds against which our customers' autonomous systems are validated. Building environments at that level of fidelity and scale demands techniques that go beyond a typical AAA game pipeline. Gaussian splat scene reconstruction, neural rendering, AI-assisted content workflows, and modern procedural systems are reshaping what a tech artist's day looks like. We're hiring a Principal Technical Artist to bring the next generation of these workflows into production at Parallel Domain. This is a senior individual contributor role: you'll work alongside our rendering, simulation, and content engineers on open-ended content and pipeline problems. You'll move fluently between Unreal Engine, Houdini, Python, shader code, and modern AI tooling, and your judgment will shape how our team builds the environments that train and validate autonomous systems. ### Responsibilities - **Own the technical content stack.** End to end: asset pipelines, procedural tooling, material systems, performance budgets, and content validation that turn an artist's intent into a production-ready scene. - **Build and ship tools.** Deliver tooling in Unreal Engine and Houdini that makes the content team measurably faster. We care less about the elegance of the tool and more about whether artists are using it next quarter to ship work they couldn't ship before. - **Drive AI-augmented workflows.** Bring modern techniques into content creation: gaussian splat scene reconstruction, neural texture synthesis, ML-assisted asset generation, and the next wave of techniques as they emerge. Hold an opinionated view on where these tools belong in a production pipeline and where they don't. - **Optimize real-time performance.** Profile and optimize across GPU and CPU in Unreal Engine, supporting both interactive use and large-scale batch simulation. Identify bottlenecks, codify the fixes as patterns, and make sure the team isn't relearning the same lessons every six months. - **Work across disciplines.** Operate as connective tissue across content, rendering, simulation, ML, and product. Translate between disciplines, broker tradeoffs between content fidelity and runtime performance, and make sure the systems we build hang together. - **Set the craft bar.** We're not asking you to manage people, but we expect you to lead by example on the craft side. Your work should make the people around you better at theirs. - **Move quickly.** Ship into production early and often. Many of the problems you'll work on don't have a known answer—your job is to scope the unknown, prototype something that works, and harden it from there. - **Use AI tooling actively.** LLM-assisted coding, scripting, and asset generation can meaningfully accelerate the work when applied well. We expect fluency here and active contribution to the team's practice. ### Required Qualifications - **Experience.** 8+ years as a technical artist or in a closely adjacent role, with at least one shipped product on a real-time, physically based rendering pipeline. - **Unreal Engine 5 expertise.** Expert-level proficiency including materials, Blueprints, performance profiling, the asset pipeline, and the engine's deeper rendering features. You can debug a frame budget, fix a broken shader, and ship a Blueprint utility in the same afternoon. - **Programming fluency.** Productive across some combination of Python, C++, HLSL, VEX, and shell. You reach for code rather than manual process whenever possible. - **Production speed.** Demonstrated ability to take open-ended content or workflow problems, scope them yourself, and ship working systems the team adopts—without extensive hand-holding. - **AI workflow fluency.** Working command of LLM-based coding tools, generative content tooling (e.g., diffusion models, ComfyUI), and the broader category of AI tools reshaping technical art. You stay on top of where these tools are heading and bring that thinking into the team's practice. - **Communication.** Equally comfortable talking shaders with rendering engineers, performance with simulation engineers, and tradeoffs with non-technical product partners. - **Generalist disposition.** Able to move pragmatically across content creation, tooling, rendering, performance, and pipeline. We're not looking for someone narrowly specialized in one corner of technical art. ### Preferred Qualifications - **Neural scene reconstruction.** Hands-on experience with gaussian splatting, NeRFs, or similar techniques in a production or near-production setting. - **Procedural content generation.** Experience in Houdini or equivalent (Maya, Blender, 3DS Max, Unreal PCG), including authoring HDAs and integrating them into a real-time pipeline. - **Sensor simulation.** Familiarity with RGB cameras, LiDAR, radar, and the visual artifacts that matter to autonomous-system perception models. - **Distributed/cloud pipelines.** Experience with distributed rendering or cloud-based content pipelines. - **Computational background.** Mathematics, physics, or computational graphics that lets you reason from first principles when a problem demands it. ### What Success Looks Like In your first six months, you'll have: - Integrated into the production pipeline and shipped meaningful content using our in-house tools. - Delivered tooling in Houdini or Unreal Engine that improves content team velocity. - Built strong working relationships with engineering, simulation, rendering, and DevOps stakeholders. - Influenced the technical roadmap with at least one concrete bet that ships customer value. ### What Makes a Great Candidate You're a generalist who's excellent at technical art, equally at home in rendering, tooling, content, and performance. You hold strong opinions about the craft but treat your tools as instruments, not identity. You're a builder, not a planner: you scope, prototype, ship, and iterate. You're paying close attention to how AI tooling is changing technical art and you want to be hands-on with that change.