Senior Linux Graphics Engineer

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 rendering pipeline is how that platform earns its credibility with customers. Rendering for machine perception is a different discipline than rendering for human eyes: output has to be physically defensible, reproducible frame to frame, and fast enough that a customer's autonomy stack isn't left waiting on it. The stack is rooted in real-time game engine technology and runs at scale in the cloud, and we're evolving it across both fronts — the graphics techniques themselves, and the platforms and APIs we run them on. We're hiring a Senior Linux Graphics Engineer to lead our cross-platform rendering work. This is a senior individual contributor role on a small, deep graphics team. Your first charter is a substantial Linux and Vulkan migration of our renderer, owned end to end from early build through production quality. From there you'll continue as a core member of the graphics team, working alongside our rendering engineers on the harder problems in the pipeline — wide-angle rendering, scene reconstruction, lighting, and GPU performance. ### Responsibilities - **Own the Linux and Vulkan migration.** Take our current Windows-based renderer from early build to production quality on Linux on Nvidia graphics: correct output across every camera, lidar, and radar configuration we support, at performance that holds up against our benchmarks. You are the person accountable for this landing. - **Close the gap between graphics backends.** Diagnose and fix the differences between our DirectX and Vulkan paths — memory footprint, shader compilation and pre-caching, driver behavior, synchronization, and the rendering artifacts that show up on one backend and not the other. - **Make correctness verifiable.** Build the comparison harnesses and regression tests that prove output equivalence across platforms. - **Profile and optimize on Linux.** Establish the GPU and CPU profiling workflow on the platform, find the bottlenecks, fix them, and codify the patterns so the team isn't rediscovering them in six months. - **Contribute to the rendering roadmap.** Beyond the migration, take on the broader rendering work: wide-angle and multi-view rendering, reconstruction-based techniques such as gaussian splatting, lighting work in collaboration with our ML team, and moving computation onto available GPU capacity. - **Work across the stack.** Partner with our build, infrastructure, and simulation engineers. The renderer doesn't ship in isolation — it ships inside a containerized application, through a build system, onto cloud GPU instances, and every one of those seams has a platform dimension. - **Use AI tooling actively.** LLM-assisted coding and debugging meaningfully accelerate this kind of work when applied well. We expect fluency here and active contribution to the team's practice. ### Required Qualifications - **Experience.** 7+ years in real-time graphics or engine programming, with at least one product you took all the way to ship. - **Vulkan depth.** Production experience with Vulkan — not a side project. You've written and debugged Vulkan render paths, reasoned about memory allocation and descriptor management, chased down synchronization and validation-layer issues, and shipped the result. - **Linux graphics in production.** You've shipped graphics software on Linux and are comfortable in that environment end to end: GPU drivers, Mesa or vendor stacks, shader toolchains, compositors, containers, and the debugging tools that actually work there. - **Modern C++.** Highly productive in a large, real C++ codebase with a serious build system and CI. You can navigate an engine you didn't write. - **GPU performance work.** Demonstrated ability to profile a frame, identify the real bottleneck, and fix it — on both GPU and CPU sides — using tools like RenderDoc, Nsight, or platform equivalents. - **Independence.** This role starts with a hard problem and not much precedent to lean on. You can scope it, sequence it, and drive it to completion without close supervision. - **Communication.** You can explain a thorny graphics tradeoff to a non-graphics engineer in five sentences, and give an honest read on schedule when one is asked for. ### Preferred Qualifications - **Unreal Engine on Linux.** You've shipped a modern Unreal Engine title (5.5 or later) on Linux with the Vulkan RHI. - **Unreal Engine internals.** Deep familiarity with UE's RHI layer, render graph, shader pipeline, and the parts of the engine most people never touch. - **Open source contribution.** Meaningful contributions to Vulkan-adjacent open source — Mesa, DXVK/VKD3D, Proton, SPIR-V tooling, validation layers, or the Vulkan ecosystem more broadly. Developers doing this work tend to know where the standard is going before the rest of us do. - **Cross-API porting.** Prior experience bringing a renderer from DirectX 11/12 to Vulkan, or the reverse. - **Adjacent low-latency graphics.** Video streaming, cloud gaming, or remote rendering backgrounds — that work lives close to Vulkan drivers and Linux GPU stacks. - **Sensor and simulation graphics.** Familiarity with lidar, radar, or camera simulation, physically based rendering for machine perception, or neural rendering and Gaussian splatting. ### Core Tools Vulkan · Unreal Engine 5 · C++ · Linux · HLSL/SPIR-V · RenderDoc · Nsight · Docker · Kubernetes · AWS · GitHub Actions ### What Success Looks Like In your first six months, you'll have: - Taken the Linux renderer to production quality, with output validated as equivalent across platforms for our supported sensor configurations. - Closed the performance and memory gap between graphics backends. - Left behind a regression and comparison harness the team trusts, so platform parity stays proven rather than assumed. - Started contributing to the broader rendering roadmap and established yourself as a peer to the rest of the graphics team. ### What Makes a Great Candidate You go deep. You like problems where the answer isn't documented anywhere and you have to read the driver source, the spec, or the disassembly to find out what's really happening. You hold strong opinions about graphics APIs and can defend them, but you treat your tools as instruments, not identity. You'd rather own something end to end than work a ticket queue. And you're drawn to what happens when real-time rendering gets pointed at machine perception instead of human eyes — the constraints are different, and most of the interesting problems are still open. ### Compensation & Location Base salary range of **$155,000 - $175,000**, commensurate with skills, qualifications, and experience. This role is fully remote within North America. Our company operates on PST working hours. ### Why join Parallel Domain? We are assembling a team of creative, talented visionaries seeking to build a new technology that will change the world. You will be able to learn, build, and scale our team and technology in a collaborative, creative culture that values every team member. To attract and inspire the right talent, we offer: - Equity - Employer-paid supplemental medical, mental health, dental, and vision benefits - Flexible paid vacation, sick time, winter shutdown, and 11+ holidays per year - Paid parental leave - Equipment budget to optimize your setup - Annual learning and development stipend