Principal Technical Artist in Vancouver

Before an autonomous vehicle navigates a busy intersection, before a robot learns to pick and place in a warehouse, before any Physical AI system is trusted in the real world, it has to prove itself in ours. Parallel Domain builds the platform that validates the next generation of autonomous systems in high‑fidelity virtual environments. Our content and rendering pipeline is how that platform earns its credibility with customers. The virtual environments we build have to hold up under physical, geometric, and sensor‑level scrutiny—they are the testbeds against which our customers’ autonomous systems are validated. Building environments at that level of fidelity and scale demands techniques that go beyond a typical AAA game pipeline.

We’re hiring a Principal Technical Artist to bring the next generation of these workflows into production at Parallel Domain. This is a senior individual contributor role: you’ll work alongside our rendering, simulation, and content engineers on open‑ended content and pipeline problems. You’ll move fluently between Unreal Engine, Houdini, Python, shader code, and modern AI tooling, and your judgment will shape how our team builds the environments that train and validate autonomous systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical content stack. End to end: asset pipelines, procedural tooling, material systems, performance budgets, and content validation that turn an artist’s intent into a production‑ready scene.
• Build and ship tools. Deliver tooling in Unreal Engine and Houdini that makes the content team measurably faster.
• Drive AI‑augmented workflows. Bring modern techniques into content creation: gaussian splat scene reconstruction, neural texture synthesis, ML‑assisted asset generation, and the next wave of techniques as they emerge.
• Optimize real‑time performance. Profile and optimize across GPU and CPU in Unreal Engine, supporting both interactive use and large‑scale batch simulation.
• Work across disciplines. Operate as connective tissue across content, rendering, simulation, ML, and product.
• Set the craft bar. Lead by example on the craft side.
• Move quickly. Ship into production early and often.
• Use AI tooling actively. LLM‑assisted coding, scripting, and asset generation can meaningfully accelerate the work when applied well.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years as a technical artist or in a closely adjacent role, with at least one shipped product on a real‑time, physically based rendering pipeline.
• Unreal Engine 5 expertise. Expert‑level proficiency including materials, Blueprints, performance profiling, the asset pipeline, and the engine’s deeper rendering features.
• Programming fluency. Productive across some combination of Python, C++, HLSL, VEX, and shell.
• Demonstrated ability to take open‑ended content or workflow problems, scope them yourself, and ship working systems the team adopts.
• Working command of LLM‑based coding tools, generative content tooling, and the broader category of AI tools reshaping technical art.
• Equally comfortable talking shaders with rendering engineers, performance with simulation engineers, and tradeoffs with non‑technical product partners.
• Able to move pragmatically across content creation, tooling, rendering, performance, and pipeline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands‑on experience with gaussian splatting, NeRFs, or similar techniques in a production or near‑production setting.
• Experience in Houdini or equivalent (Maya, Blender, 3DS Max, Unreal PCG), including authoring HDAs and integrating them into a real‑time pipeline.
• Familiarity with RGB cameras, LiDAR, radar, and the visual artifacts that matter to autonomous‑system perception models.
• Experience with distributed rendering or cloud‑based content pipelines.
• Mathematics, physics, or computational graphics background.

What Success Looks Like

• Integrated into the production pipeline and shipped meaningful content using our in‑house tools.
• Delivered tooling in Houdini or Unreal Engine that improves content team velocity.
• Brought strong working relationships with engineering, simulation, rendering, and DevOps stakeholders.
• Influenced the technical roadmap with at least one concrete bet that ships customer value.

What Makes a Great Candidate

You’re a generalist who’s excellent at technical art, equally at home in rendering, tooling, content, and performance. You hold strong opinions about the craft but treat your tools as instruments, not identity. You’re a builder, not a planner: you scope, prototype, ship, and iterate. You’re paying close attention to how AI tooling is changing technical art and you want to be hands‑on with that change.

Base salary range of CAD $145,000–$175,000, depending on skills, qualifications, and experience, plus equity, full health/dental/vision coverage, learning stipend, and generous vacation. This role is based remotely or hybrid in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, BC or Seattle, WA).