Principal Technical Artist

About the role

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. Gaussian splat scene reconstruction, neural rendering, AI-assisted content workflows, and modern procedural systems are reshaping what a tech artist's day looks like. 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. 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).

Requirements

• Experience. 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. You can debug a frame budget, fix a broken shader, and ship a Blueprint utility in the same afternoon.
• Programming fluency. Productive across some combination of Python, C++, HLSL, VEX, and shell. You reach for code rather than manual process whenever possible.
• Production speed. Demonstrated ability to take open-ended content or workflow problems, scope them yourself, and ship working systems the team adopts-without extensive hand-holding.
• AI workflow fluency. Working command of LLM-based coding tools, generative content tooling (e.g., diffusion models, ComfyUI), and the broader category of AI tools reshaping technical art. You stay on top of where these tools are heading and bring that thinking into the team's practice.
• Communication. Equally comfortable talking shaders with rendering engineers, performance with simulation engineers, and tradeoffs with non-technical product partners.
• Generalist disposition. Able to move pragmatically across content creation, tooling, rendering, performance, and pipeline. We're not looking for someone narrowly specialized in one corner of technical art.

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