Graphics Engineer

Cloudhead Games is the veteran VR studio behind the multi-award winning titles, Pistol Whip, an action-rhythm shooter (GOTY, DICE Awards) and the fantasy adventure series, The Gallery (GOTY, VR Awards.) Cloudhead has partnered multiple times with industry legend Valve to create tech demos, with the most notable being Aperture Hand Lab, a humorous Valve Index controller demo set in the Portal Universe. Always innovating, Cloudhead is also known for its early solutions in VR locomotion/comfort with snap turns and teleportation, as well as VR motion capture and hand interactions.

Cloudhead Games is a fully remote company working Pacific Time Zone hours.

As a Graphics Engineer at Cloudhead Games, you will play a major role in developing solutions that will help define the future of our visual technology, and create more unique VR experiences. You’ll work closely with the engineering leads, technical artists, and designers to make sure they can get the most out of the technology.

What you would do:

• Help improve the performance and stability of our VR game in Unity
• Develop new and enhance existing graphics technologies (rendering, lighting, shadows, shaders, culling, scene management and others) to help achieve state-of-the-art visuals
• Investigate and implement rendering techniques to make graphics more immersive and expressive
• Design, build and support state of the art rendering infrastructure and devise development plans
• Work closely with the rest of the programming team to assist in integrating graphics technologies, identify extensions to that technology, and help create those improvements
• Contribute to R&D efforts for new tools, workflows, and rendering techniques that enhance our pipeline
• Design, maintains, implements, tests and debugs code, pipelines and other rendering-related sub-components and packages.
• Profiles and optimizes rendering modules of a game engine.
• Provide mentorship and feedback to technical artists and support cross-discipline collaboration.

What you will bring:

• 5+ years of professional experience building graphics features and tools, ideally on AAA or high-quality indie titles
• Strong C# skills and the ability to code and architect low-level rendering systems
• Broad knowledge of graphics APIs
• D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, Metal and console platforms
• Knowledge of one or more GPU APIs (OpenGL, DirectX and similar)
• HLSL or other vendor specific shader programming language
• Experience developing graphics techniques and detailed knowledge of graphics hardware
• Math skills including trigonometry, calculus, and linear algebra
• Formal background in rendering with experience that may include shaders, animation, skinning, lighting, special effects, and tool development
• Debugging graphics pipelines using relevant platform tooling (Renderdoc, Pix, Razor GPU, etc.)
• The ability to reason about code performance and memory consumption
• Comfortable working with procedural workflows
• Comfortable working with multiplayer
• Excellent communication, organizational skills, and a collaborative mindset
• Self-driven, proactive, and passionate about rendering techniques

Nice to have:

• Worked with Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipelines, specifically URP in a VR context
• Familiarity creating custom lighting / shadowing solutions, particularly in a VR / mobile context.
• Previous work on shipped VR titles.

Compensation

Cloudhead Games is committed to pay that feels fair, and that fits in with our overall compensation philosophy focused on work life balance. We welcome candidates to have conversations with our recruitment team regarding their salary expectations and how they align with our established ranges. As we better understand your skillset, it may be determined that your experience aligns more with a higher or lower level of seniority. We will always try to be proactive in communication with applicants about where they might fall in a seniority band.

The salary range for this position is CAD $90k-$120k.

What’s in it for you?

• Work 7-hour days from home and have flexibility in your schedule
• Competitive salary and generous benefits – medical, dental, vision, wellness and profit sharing
• Paid time-off, unlimited health days and 2-week winter shut down
• 12-week Maternity/Parental leave top up
• Professional development days and funds
• Career growth opportunities
• Annual gaming reimbursement

At Cloudhead Games, we are truly a community that puts people first, and we encourage humans of different backgrounds and perspectives to join our team. Building an inclusive virtual workplace where we are able to create, contribute and learn together is a studio-wide commitment. Cloudhead provides an accessible candidate experience. If you need any accommodations or adjustments throughout the interview process and beyond, please let us know.

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