Job Details

Senior Technical Artist Materials, Shading & FX

We believe in improving people's lives by making transportation safer, more accessible, and more convenient. We're 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 it's 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

We're looking for a Senior Technical Artist Materials, Shading & FX to help build the virtual worlds our AV stack learns from. You will own the physically based material and FX pipeline for our simulation engines: designing procedural shaders, authoring photorealistic materials, building a scalable material library, and creating weather and water FX that behave realistically at city scale. Procedural environment experience is a plus, especially if combined with strong C++ skills. You'll partner closely with content, rendering, simulation, and perception teams to ensure our worlds both look real and behave consistently for sensors and ML models.

What You'll Do

Material & shading pipeline

• Own the PBR material pipeline for our simulation engines (e.g., MDL, MaterialX, shader graphs, or equivalent).
• Design procedural material and shader systems that generate families of related materials (roads, terrain, vehicles, props) from controlled parameters.
• Author and calibrate photorealistic materials that remain physically plausible across different cameras, exposure settings, and scenarios.
• Build and maintain a material library for our virtual world, including standards for naming, parameter ranges.
• Profile and optimize shaders for performance in large, complex scenes.
• Implement and maintain low?level shader code where graphs aren't sufficient, exposing artist?friendly controls.

Environmental FX (weather, water, and impacts)

• Create environmental FX including weather, water interaction (puddles, splashes, standing water), debris, dust, and other large?scale events.
• Use simulation and procedural techniques for placement and behavior of FX, including accumulation and interaction with the environment and vehicles.
• Author FX shaders and materials (particles, volumes) that integrate cleanly with the core shading pipeline.

Procedural environments (bonus)

• Build or extend procedural systems to populate large?scale environments (roads, terrain, foliage, props) while respecting performance and simulation constraints.
• Leverage industry standard DCC tools or write code/plugins where necessary to solve simulation needs.

Collaboration & tools

• Partner with Simulation, ML, and Perception teams to align materials and FX with sensor models and evaluation metrics.
• Work with rendering and tools engineers to profile, debug, and optimize materials and FX.
• Share standards, build example scenes, and mentor artists and technical artists on PBR and FX workflows.
• (Bonus) Use C++ and/or Python to extend engine features, add custom nodes/operators, or integrate procedural environment systems.

Your Skills & Abilities

Experience

• 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) as a Technical Artist, FX TD, Look?Dev/Materials TD, or similar hybrid role in games, VFX, animation, virtual production, or simulation.
• A strong reel/portfolio focused on materials/shading and FX, with clear notes on your personal contributions.
• Experience on top?tier studios or flagship projects (high?end VFX/animation, AAA games, virtual production, or similar).

Materials & shading

• Deep understanding of physically based rendering (PBR), BRDFs, and texture workflows, and how to keep materials physically plausible.
• Proven experience owning a material/shader pipeline in a real?time or near?real?time engine (Unreal, Unity, proprietary, etc.).
• Strong skills in procedural material authoring (e.g., Substance Designer, MaterialX, MDL, custom node graphs).
• Comfort with both shader graphs and low?level shader code, including debugging and performance tuning.

FX / VFX

• Production experience building weather and environmental FX (rain, snow, hail, fog, water surfaces, spray, etc.).
• Experience simulating or procedurally generating FX and integrating them into a game/simulation engine.
• A track record of making FX and materials work together (wetness, accumulation, interaction with motion and environment).

Tools & mindset

• Strong Python skills for pipeline tools, exporters, validators, and DCC integrations; PySide/PyQt is a plus.
• (Bonus) C++ experience extending engines or implementing high?performance procedural or environment systems.
• (Bonus) Experience with procedural environment generation and placement systems in a game, VFX, or simulation pipeline.
• Ability to profile and diagnose performance issues around materials, shaders, FX, and environment complexity, and communicate findings to both artists and engineers.
• Comfortable owning problems end?to?end and bridging art and engineering when priorities or constraints conflict.

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge

Experience with USD and/or MDL in production pipelines. Background generating synthetic data or calibrating content to real?world cameras and sensors. Familiarity with ray?traced or path?traced real?time rendering in large environments. Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety?critical simulation domains.

Compensation

The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paid in accordance with applicable state laws. The compensation may not be representative for positions located outside of the California Bay Area. The salary range for this role is $153,200 and $234,100. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position. Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

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.

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.