Yuna Tanaka Senior Graphics Engineer
Redmond, WA • gfxeng@gmail.com • +1 425-555-0192
Profile Summary
- Senior Graphics Engineer with 9 years of experience shipping a AAA console + PC FPS franchise across character rendering, lighting, and post-processing pipelines, specializing in render-graph architecture, PBR lighting, and GPU-perf-driven shader authoring.
- Solid technical background across rendering pipelines (clustered forward+), shader languages (HLSL, GLSL), graphics APIs (DirectX 12, Vulkan), lighting on PBR with GGX-Smith BRDF, post-FX stack TAA + DLSS + FSR 3, ray tracing on DXR + Vulkan RT, target platforms PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and profiling with (RGP, RenderDoc), with strong fundamentals in frame-budget discipline, GPU-perf-driven authoring, and a tight feedback loop with lighting artists.
- Deep expertise in real-time rendering pipeline architecture, shader authoring and PBR material systems, post-processing and temporal upscalers, and GPU performance and cross-platform tuning, applying practices such as render-graph passes with explicit barriers and GPU-capture-driven profiling and bottleneck removal to deliver frame-budget-clean, visually consistent, and artist-friendly graphics code.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Engine, Lighting Art, Technical Art, and Platform leadership in long-cycle AAA productions with milestone perf cuts, contributing to rendering-architecture reviews, perf war rooms, and visual-target retrospectives with a pragmatic, ship-it-then-polish mindset.
- Senior engineer who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of code-review and capture-review rigor and frame-budget and visual-quality discipline through code-review coaching and shader-pattern mentorship, while running weekly rendering architecture council sessions and authoring widely adopted rendering-pattern and material-system handbooks.
Technical Skills
- Rendering Pipelines:
- Forward, deferred, forward+, clustered, visibility buffer, render graphs, command-buffer recording, pass dependencies
- Shader Programming:
- HLSL, GLSL, MSL, Slang, vertex / pixel / compute / mesh shaders, ray tracing shaders, SPIR-V, DXIL
- Graphics APIs:
- DirectX 12, Vulkan, Metal, DirectX 11, OpenGL, descriptor heaps / sets, pipeline state objects, fences + barriers
- Lighting & Materials:
- PBR, GGX-Smith BRDF, light probes, GI volumes, baked lightmaps, RTGI, cascaded shadow maps, contact shadows, layered materials
- Post-Processing & AA:
- Tone mapping, exposure, bloom, motion blur, depth of field, SSAO / GTAO, SSR, TAA, FSR, DLSS, XeSS, MSAA
- GPU Performance & Profiling:
- RenderDoc, PIX, RGP, Nsight Graphics, Razor (PS), Metal System Trace, GPU bottleneck analysis, draw-call batching, culling, LOD
- Ray Tracing & Compute:
- DXR, Vulkan RT, Metal RT, BVH management, denoisers (ReSTIR, SVGF), hybrid pipelines, compute shaders (particles, hair, water)
- Geometry & Cross-Platform:
- GPU skinning, morph targets, virtual geometry (Nanite-style), tessellation, mobile tile-based deferred (Adreno, Mali, Apple GPU), TRC sign-off
Education
University of Washington
M.S. in Computer Science (Real-Time Rendering)
Work Experience
Halo Studios
Senior Graphics Engineer
- Own the rendering pipeline for the Halo franchise's clustered forward+ renderer on Unreal 5 across 4 platform targets and 7 render-graph rewrites, with influence across 22+ engineers across rendering, tools, and tech-art pods.
- Authored layered character + skin shaders and a unified material model in HLSL with cross-compile to Vulkan, instrumented with GPU-capture diff harnesses, and cut shader-permutation count by 41% across the character library.
- Built the graphics-API layer with DirectX 12 bindless descriptors and Vulkan parity backend, coordinating pipeline-state-object lifetimes and barrier graphs to deliver cross-platform parity within 0.4ms across PS5 / Series X.
- Drove the PBR pipeline with RTGI fallback and cascaded shadow maps through 3 art-director reviews, delivering 2.6ms lighting-pass savings while preserving art-director sign-off.
- Shipped the TAA + FSR 3 upscaler and tone-mapping rework across all platform variants, hitting 4K-equivalent quality at 1440p input cost in side-by-side perceptual reviews.
- Drove the GPU perf pass in RGP + RenderDoc, pulling frame time from 18.2 ms to 15.9 ms and shipping locked 60 FPS on Series X performance mode across all 9 launch scenes.
- Implemented DXR ray-traced shadows with a SVGF denoiser and a fallback path for non-RT hardware, hitting hybrid pipeline within 2.1ms of raster baseline on Series X.
The Coalition
Graphics Engineer
- Owned GPU skinning, morph targets, and virtual-geometry experiments on Unreal 4 across the Gears program, delivering 68% draw-call reduction across crowd scenes via mesh-shader cluster culling.
- Tuned rendering across Xbox One X / Series X|S / PC across NVIDIA + AMD + Intel, addressing vendor-specific quirks (occupancy, descriptor budgets, sampler heuristics) and delivering zero-cert findings across 3 Microsoft submissions.
- Built in-engine GPU capture viewer and a PBR balance overlay with partner lighting + tech artists, adopted by 18 lighting + tech artists across 2 studios and cited in 2 internal postmortems as a top-3 production accelerator.
- Partnered with Engine, Lighting Art, Technical Art, and Platform teams across 2 shipped titles and 3 visual-target tech demos, authoring 28 rendering-architecture RFCs and capture-review notes that became the team's rendering baseline and onboarding 4 new graphics engineers into the team's capture + perf review workflow.