--- title: 'Software Engineer, 3D Rendering at Mirage' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-3d-rendering-mirage-new-york-5nqayqt36cy6' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-27' --- # Software Engineer, 3D Rendering at Mirage - **Company:** Mirage - **Location:** New York, NY - **Employment:** full-time - **Posted:** 2026-10-23 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-27 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mirage/6fc84af9-2c9f-4814-88b3-9f60afd924a5 ## Job description 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 architectural decisions and help build the team around them. ## What you'll do - Define the architecture for photoreal 3D: how ray tracing, rasterization and denoising divide the work, and how that maps onto Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D and WebGPU. - Build light transport: global illumination, reflections and refraction, soft shadows from area lights, and volumetrics such as haze, fog and light shafts. - Build a physically based model for materials, lights and cameras: energy-conserving materials (metal, glass, clearcoat, sheen, translucency), lights in real-world units, and a camera with exposure, depth of field and motion blur. - Own image quality: sampling, antialiasing, accumulation, denoising and firefly suppression, with frames that stay stable and deterministic across a video export. - Scale scenes to production complexity with acceleration structures, instancing, culling and memory management, for millions of triangles and tens of thousands of objects. - Integrate 3D into Tesseract's video, motion graphics and compositing pipeline, including ACES color management and render passes such as depth, normals, motion vectors and light groups. - Make render cost predictable and rendering robust: performance budgets, profiling, and headless batch rendering on local and cloud GPUs. - Design 3D APIs that work for people and AI agents alike: a clear scene representation, actionable validation errors, fast previews and render cost known before the render. - Work with engine, product and AI teams, and help hire and grow the 3D rendering team. What makes you a great fit - Deep experience building physically based renderers in production: film or offline renderers, path tracers, or game engines with ray-traced or hybrid lighting. - Strong command of light transport: the rendering equation, Monte Carlo integration, importance sampling, material models and denoising. - Hands-on GPU ray tracing: building and traversing acceleration structures (BVHs), hardware ray-tracing APIs such as Metal ray tracing, Vulkan ray tracing or DXR, and compute-based fallbacks. - A solid understanding of modern rasterization pipelines, and of how hybrid renderers combine rasterization with ray tracing. - Hands-on experience with Metal, Vulkan, Direct3D 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. ## About Mirage ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Mirage builds full-stack AI foundation models and products that turn voice and language into photorealistic video, empowering creators and businesses to produce high-quality video content instantly. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series D, total funding $175M) - **Headquarters**: New York, United States - **Founded**: 2021 - **Founders**: Gaurav Misra (CEO) and Dwight Churchill (COO) ## Core Business - **Primary industries**: AI video generation, generative media, software development - **Target customers**: Content creators, businesses, marketing teams, enterprises (B2B and B2C) - **Mission**: To close the gap between idea and video, making video creation as fast and intuitive as thought. ## Products & Services - **Captions**: An all-in-one AI video editor and generator for iOS and web. Users can create footage with AI avatars or digital twins, generate videos from text prompts, and add automated captions, visuals, and audio. - **Mirage API**: Enables bulk video generation and captioning, allowing developers to integrate state-of-the-art video intelligence into their own workflows. - **Mirage Foundation Models**: Proprietary multimodal models that produce A-roll footage with natural lip movement, eye contact, and emotional expression from voice and language input. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (Tracxn lists a current valuation but masks the figure) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $175M across 5 rounds (Seed, Series A, B, C, and debt financing) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, plus angel investors Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Lenny Rachitsky, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Nico Wittenborn, Jared Leto, and others. - **Growth Signals**: - 20M+ creators and businesses use Captions - 3M+ monthly videos created - 100K+ daily active users (estimated) - Headcount grew 12.9% year-over-year to 59 employees - Acquired AlpacaML (Nov 2024) to expand capabilities - Presence in Germany, Austria, and Philippines alongside US headquarters ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-stack foundation models**: Mirage owns the entire stack from model training to consumer and enterprise products, giving them tight integration and rapid iteration. - **Multimodal realism**: Their models synchronize speech with natural lip movement, eye contact, and emotional expression, creating highly believable AI-generated video. - **Product ecosystem**: A single platform (Captions) plus an API and model licensing enables both direct consumer use and B2B integration. - **Talent density**: Team includes alumni from Google DeepMind, Snap, Instagram, Palantir, and other top AI/tech companies. ## Strategic Focus - Continue scaling Captions as the go-to AI video editor for creators and businesses - Expand the Mirage API to power video generation at scale for enterprise customers - Advance foundation model research to improve realism, speed, and multilingual support - Grow headcount selectively (19 open roles as of mid-2026) with emphasis on engineering, AI research, and marketing ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Early-stage environment where employees have outsized impact on product and company direction. Emphasis on craft, technical excellence, and creative problem-solving. - **Team**: Small (59 people) but highly skilled, with many hires from top AI labs and consumer tech companies. - **Work model**: Headquarters in New York City (177 Huntington Ave); hybrid/remote policy not explicitly stated but likely flexible given global team. - **Perks**: Not detailed, but the company’s rapid growth and strong funding suggest competitive compensation and equity. - **Mission**: Opportunity to shape the future of AI-generated video at a company that is redefining how people create and communicate. ## Sources 1. [mirage.app](https://mirage.app/about-us) 2. [mirage.app](https://website.mirage.app/) 3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/trymirage) 4. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/mirage/__AVHAd-QsYzzkaex-b7taDC1oRlTkqQfUOGstLg-OGAQ) 5. 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