Mark Leone
Principal Engineer at NVIDIA
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMark Leone is a Principal Engineer at NVIDIA with 16 years driving high-performance rendering and shading systems for film and real-time graphics. He co-developed Weta Digital’s Manuka renderer and led its rendering technology team, contributing to over 30 feature films and an Academy Award–nominated VFX pipeline. Previously he was a lead developer of RenderMan at Pixar and architected shading languages and compilers at Intel, blending deep compiler expertise with production-proven rendering. His work emphasizes performance through locality-aware batch shading and native-code generation from shading languages—approaches that enabled Manuka’s use in both blockbuster VFX and theme-park attractions. Based in Salt Lake City, he combines research-grade systems thinking with hands-on production delivery across studio and platform environments. He’s as comfortable writing compiler backends as he is shaping long-term rendering roadmaps for large engineering teams.
16 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Cornell UniversityMS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (30)
raytracing10
computer-graphics10
gpu9
cpp9
cuda9
c-library8
visual-studio8
cmake8
windows8
setuptools7
pdf-viewer7
pdf7
linux7
swig7
package-manager7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
NVIDIA/otk-demand-loading
Dec 2022 - Jan 2023
Contributions:11 releases, 11 commits, 7 PRs in 1 month
NVIDIA/otk-examples
Dec 2022 - Mar 2023
Examples that demonstrate uses of the OptiX Tookit
Contributions:12 releases, 26 commits, 3 PRs in 2 months
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