Senior Staff Software Engineer, Graphics
Own and scale VSCO’s GPU image-processing engine (Reflex) and ship Studio Pro features on iOS/macOS while mentoring engineers and improving team workflows.
- Compensation
- $260K–$290K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years in engineering, owner of a production rendering/imaging/GPU-compute system
- Deep GPU/rendering experience: pipelines, shaders, color, memory
- Strong systems language experience; Rust preferred
- Experience taking imaging/graphics work onto mobile (iOS/Metal preferred)
- Experience working 0→1 inside an existing product
- Experience mentoring Senior engineers to Staff-level leaders
- AI-assisted developer workflows actually landed in a team
Nice to have
- wgpu, WebGPU, or WASM
- Native bridges (UniFFI, JNI, Nitro) and React Native
- Photographic imaging: RAW, color management, LUTs, film emulation
- On-device or cloud ML in a creative-tools context
Full description
About VSCO
For years, we've helped photographers create their work. Now we're building what comes next.
VSCO exists for photographers. Not as a side feature, not as an afterthought, but as the whole point. We build the connected system photographers rely on, and we've spent over a decade earning the trust of a global creative community that takes the craft seriously.
Photography is at an inflection point. AI is reshaping what's possible for creative work, and that's where our mission shines. VSCO is building the full photographer's workflow: from creating and editing your work, to delivering it to clients, to running your business. All of it built thoughtfully, with photographers leading the way. We believe the future of photography tools creates more space for creativity, handling the busy work so photographers can focus on the craft.
If you care about craft, community, and what technology can unlock for creative people, this is the work. We're a mission-driven and focused company where your work ships quickly, is meaningful, and reaches tens of millions of people worldwide. You'll have a real say in what we build and how we build it. We hire people who don't wait to be asked, naturally connect the dots, care about the quality of what they ship, and believe the best outcomes come from building together.
About The Role
VSCO is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to own Reflex, our production GPU image-processing engine, and the path it takes into Studio Pro on iOS and macOS.
This is a critical technical leader. You will deepen a stack that is already in customers’ hands: new capabilities (RAW, large-image export, desktop), production quality (color correctness, memory, performance), and the contracts that let product engineers ship on top of the engine without becoming graphics programmers. You will also lead company-wide engineering mentorship and force-multiplication — tools, workflows, and AI-assisted development that make the rest of the team more effective.
In This Role, You Will
- Own the Reflex imaging engine: DAG execution, WGSL operators, GPU resource/memory budgets, and color management (linear working space, LUTs, Display P3, bit-depth)
- Ship engine changes through the native bridge (UniFFI + Nitro) into Studio Pro on iOS and macOS, including versioning and release
- Take new imaging capabilities from design to production (current examples: RAW develop, tiled/gigapixel export, further parity with the existing VSCO imaging stack)
- Diagnose and fix production-class mobile graphics problems: OOM, cache eviction, HEIC encode, editor vs. batch vs. export paths
- Define and keep the render/pipeline contracts in the shared Studio Pro core so mobile and desktop stay coherent