Principal Lighting Scientist

Job Description

OVERVIEW

Epic Games has openings at its Cary, NC studio for Principal Lighting Scientists to lead research and development efforts to advance the lighting rendering capabilities of the Unreal Engine.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
• Lead rendering research efforts that drive technological advances of Unreal Engine by solving open-ended problems for which the industry has no solutions-usually, these problems require ambitious solutions, and the outcome is uncertain.
• Develop a hypothesis, validating them with experiments following the scientific method of problem-solving and providing these solutions to Software Developers that can implement when the methodology is defined.
• Design the theoretical foundations used to build state-of-the-art rendering technology used to drive Unreal Engine forward and support its rendering technology, such as light transport novel algorithms, ray tracing, and light baking systems, and general computer graphics techniques.
• Have authority and responsibility for an R&D project(s) that have high organizational impact.
• Keep up with latest research and innovations which may impact on the rendering technologies developed at the organization.
• Review work, data, and reports produced within the rendering R&D team to ensure accuracy and compliance.
• Work directly with partners and licensees to understand their needs and design research methodology to develop solutions not yet available in the industry.
• Train and supervise the research, development, and experimental work of other junior research scientists.
• Advise senior management, technical project leaders, and other principal scientists on the feasibility, suitability, and efficacy of the research work done by the rendering R&D team to help them make key business decisions.
• Ensure the rendering teams have the resources to properly perform research tasks.
• Streamline research processes so that the team operates at maximum efficiency.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:

Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, or closely related degree, or foreign equivalent.

Three (3) years of professional experience in the video game industry as a rendering programmer working with Unreal Engine and with all of the following :
• Developing, debugging, and performance profiling platforms such as PC, PlayStation, and Xbox
• Working on at least one shipped multiplayer game with tight release cycles across multiple platforms such as desktop and consoles.
• Experience with and up-to-date knowledge of Unreal Engine code base, especially rendering and RHI (Rendering Hardware Interface) related modules.
• Content streaming such as texture or mesh streaming for a shipped game.
• Multithreaded programming, GPU programming, and graphics memory management.
• Enhancing and maintaining graphics programming and creating new features for game engines, such as Unreal Engine.
• Writing graphics applications and shaders.
• Programming using languages C++, HLSL, GLSL, PSSL, Python, and C#.
• Engineering manual and automated testing, bug fixing, and software maintenance.
• Software development in Visual Studio.

Applicants must submit a sample of work demonstrating their ability to create tools that improve performance and rendering quality.

Applicants must pass a coding exercise to qualify for the position.

Multiple openings for this position.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-g63pyn-3-129-247-196-42 in your application.