Description
The Role
As the Tech Lead Manager for the Rendering Infrastructure team within Simulation, you will be both the senior technical leader and the people manager for a small, high-leverage group of engineers. The team owns the foundational systems that the broader Rendering team builds on top of — asset pipelines, GPU memory and resource management, acceleration structure construction, build and developer tooling, profiling infrastructure, and the core engine abstractions that power our GPU-accelerated, physics-based sensor simulation system. This is an explicitly hybrid role: you will set technical direction, drive the hardest architectural decisions, write and review meaningful amounts of code, and mentor engineers — while also owning the team's roadmap, hiring, growth, and delivery. We expect you to remain a strong, current contributor in C++/CUDA and rendering systems; this is not a role where you stop being an engineer. You will partner with the rest of Rendering and Simulation leadership to make sure the infrastructure scales with the fidelity, scene complexity, and throughput demands of autonomous vehicle development.
What You'll Do
This role is roughly half hands-on technical leadership and half people management. The exact split will flex with team size and project phase, but you should expect to spend significant time both in the codebase and in 1:1s.
**As a tech lead and senior engineer, you will:**
- Own the technical direction of the Rendering Infrastructure stack — driving architecture across asset ingestion, GPU memory and resource management, acceleration structure construction, profiling infrastructure, and core engine APIs.
- Write and review meaningful amounts of C++ and CUDA code, including the hardest or most cross-cutting pieces of work that benefit from your context and seniority.
- Lead design reviews, author technical design documents, and make the calls on key trade-offs around performance, complexity, and maintainability.
- Personally drive or directly contribute to flagship initiatives — for example, scaling to significantly larger scenes, reducing iteration time for rendering engineers, or enabling real-time / near-real-time rendering for reinforcement learning workloads.
- Profile, debug, and optimize complex GPU and C++ systems alongside the team when the problem is hard enough to warrant it.
- Set and enforce the bar for code quality, testing, and engineering practices through hands-on code review and example.
**As the manager of the team, you will:**
- Manage, coach, and grow a small team of rendering and systems engineers — running 1:1s, giving feedback, supporting career development, and conducting performance reviews.
- Own the Rendering Infrastructure roadmap: gather inputs from partner teams, prioritize ruthlessly, and translate strategy into concrete quarterly plans and well-scoped projects.
- Recruit and hire engineers — owning sourcing strategy, interview loops, and closing — to build out the team thoughtfully.
- Collaborate with leads on the Rendering algorithms team, Simulation platform teams, and downstream consumers (perception, RL, HIL) to align infrastructure investment with the needs of the broader org.
- Maintain a healthy engineering process: design review cadence, on-call and incident response for infrastructure, and clear ownership across the team.
- Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools across the team to accelerate prototyping, testing, and code quality.
- Represent the team in leadership forums, communicate progress and risks clearly upward, and advocate for the infrastructure investments needed to keep the platform scaling.
Your Skills & Abilities
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Graphics, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 7+ years of professional C++ development experience, with deep knowledge of modern C++ (C++17/20), memory management, and performance optimization — and the ability and willingness to keep contributing code at a senior level.
- Significant hands-on experience with GPU programming (CUDA, OptiX, Vulkan, or similar) and a working understanding of GPU architecture and execution models.
- Proven track record working on rendering systems, game engines, simulation platforms, or other performance-critical real-time graphics/systems software — as an IC, not only as a manager.
- Prior experience as a tech lead, staff/principal IC, or tech lead manager, with a demonstrated ability to set technical direction across a team and personally drive the hardest pieces of work.
- People management experience — formally or in a tech-lead capacity — including mentoring engineers, running technical hiring loops, and being accountable for team delivery. Direct reports experience is a strong plus but not strictly required if your tech-lead background is unambiguous.
- Strong understanding of data structures and algorithms relevant to rendering: spatial acceleration structures (BVH/kd-tree), scene graphs, texture management, and resource streaming.
- Experience profiling and optimizing complex C++ and GPU codebases (e.g., Nsight, Tracy, perf, custom instrumentation).
- Comfort working in large, multi-module C++ codebases with CMake-based build systems, and a strong appreciation for developer experience and iteration speed.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to drive technical and organizational alignment across teams.
What Will Give You A Competitive Edge
- Prior experience in an explicit Tech Lead Manager (TLM) or player-coach role on a rendering, GPU, graphics, or systems infrastructure team.
- Experience with USD (Universal Scene Description) or similar scene description frameworks, asset pipelines, or DCC tool integration.
- Background in physically-based rendering, material systems (MDL, OSL), or spectral rendering.
- Familiarity with ROS and integrating rendering or sensor simulation into robotics data pipelines.
- Experience supporting reinforcement learning environments, gym-style simulation interfaces, or hardware-in-the-loop systems as downstream consumers.
- Knowledge of ray tracing theory, radiometric sensor modeling, or computational photography.
- Experience with large-scale asset pipelines, texture compression (BCn, ASTC), or virtual texturing.
- Contributions to open-source rendering, game engine, or simulation projects.
Compensation & Benefits
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The salary range for this role is $185,100 to $284,100. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.
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Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
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Benefits: GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.
Company Vehicle
Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Note: program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.
Remote: Reporting where work can/needs to be performed / collaboration should happen. If the person lives w/n 50 miles of such a location, they are expected to come in three times a week. If they do not live within 50 miles of any of those locations, they don’t need to report in.
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