Software Engineer, Photoreal 3D

The posting, as Mirage wrote it

Mirage is an AI video company focused on making creation dramatically easier. Our team tackles some of the hardest creative and technical challenges in generative media.

We get to rethink how people collaborate with AI that can actually do creative work with them—defining entirely new interaction paradigms for AI-native video tools. We make that possible by building multimodal agents that turn creative direction into edits, rendering engines that composite multiple layers of video and graphics, and generative video models trained from the ground up that create new media when needed.

All of this comes together in Captions, our creative workspace for generating, editing, and designing video. The technology behind Captions is now available more broadly: Tesseract gives any AI agent native video-editing capabilities, while developers can integrate our models into their own products through APIs.

Explore our work
Captions https://apps.apple.com/us/app/captions-ai-edits-your-video/id1541407007 — Our flagship creative workspace
Tesseract https://x.com/trymirage/status/2102429594804429138 — Our professional video engine for AI agents
Research https://mirage.app/research?utm_source=chatgpt.com — The foundation models we build in-house
Updates https://x.com/trymirage — The latest from Mirage
TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/24/mirage-raises-75m-to-continue-building-models-for-its-ai-video-editing-app-captions/, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/companies/captions/?list=ai50, Fast Company https://www.fastcompany.com/91270234/video-most-innovative-companies-fast-company-2025-youtube-roku-tubi-vimeo-captions-descript-cour-procreate-synthesia-beeble — Press

Our Investors

We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, and more.

Please note that most of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square)

About the role

We want Tesseract https://mirage.app/tesseract to render 3D that is indistinguishable from footage. You'll be the founding engineer for photoreal 3D in Tesseract, our Rust-based, cross-platform graphics and media rendering engine.

Tesseract already renders video, motion graphics, effects and compositing in a color- managed pipeline. You'll build 3D to the same standard: a fast interactive preview for editing, and a physically based final render, path-traced or hybrid ray-traced, that produces film-quality frames for export. Both run from one scene, material and lighting model, so what people see while they edit is what they export.

Scenes are authored by people and by AI agents, so render cost, failure modes and APIs matter as much as image quality. This is a foundational role: you'll make the core
[…]
irect3D or WebGPU, including compute shaders, GPU profiling and GPU debugging.

• Proficiency in Rust or C++, with strong reasoning about memory, concurrency and performance.
• Strong foundations in the mathematics of graphics: linear algebra, geometry, probability and sampling.
• An eye for realism: you can look at a frame, say why it doesn't read as real, and fix the cause.
• Experience owning complex technical projects and making architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.

Even better if…

• You've worked on the internals of a production renderer or engine such as Cycles, Arnold, RenderMan, V-Ray, Karma, Unreal Engine (Lumen or its path tracer) or Unity HDRP.
• You've built or integrated ML denoisers, or worked on neural rendering.
• You've worked with color management (ACES, OpenColorIO), HDR output or film-look pipelines.
• You've built on cross-platform graphics abstractions such as wgpu, including extending them where they lack features such as ray tracing.
• You've optimized rendering for Apple silicon or mobile GPUs.
• You have experience with Rust, video compositing, or integrating 2D and 3D rendering in creative tools.

BENEFITS

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• 401K with employer match
• Commuter Benefits
• Catered lunch multiple days per week
• Dinner stipend every night if you're working late and want a bite!
• Grubhub subscription
• Health & Wellness Perks
• Multiple team offsites per year with team events every month
• Generous PTO policy

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.