Tom Cauchois
Lead Engineer, GPU Team at Pixar Animation Studios
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTom Cauchois is a lead engineer specializing in GPU and rendering systems with 12 years of experience, currently driving Hydra development at Pixar to push graphical fidelity in content-creation tools. He’s a hands-on generalist who spans user experience, OS internals, embedded electronics, and low-level graphics, with a career that ranges from videogame engines to robotics and consumer hardware. Tom has deep C++ and rendering pipeline expertise demonstrated by contributions to Pixar’s OpenUSD/Hydra and low-level mesh, primvar, and selection improvements in USD Imaging. He’s led and mentored small engineering teams, enjoying the craft of building strong team dynamics as much as shipping complex systems. Past roles include hardware bringup and control systems at X and 3D Robotics and embedded systems leadership at Other Machine Co. An uncommon thread in his work is a persistent focus on where math and programming meet real-world systems—from inertial navigation and battery estimators to GPU rasterization.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (6)
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
usd10
3d-graphics8
architecture8
architectures8
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
PixarAnimationStudios/OpenUSD
Feb 2017 - Nov 2022
Universal Scene Description
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:75 reviews, 424 commits, 1 PR in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tom made several contributions related to the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, focusing on improvements and bug fixes within the USD Imaging library. The commits primarily involve modifications to the C++ code, specifically related to handling mesh data, primvar management, and the integration of render settings. The user also updated the selection highlighting mechanisms within the USD view and improved various low-level components in the rendering system, showing a deep understanding of the rendering pipeline.
universal-scene-descriptionscene
tcauchois/ardupilot
Aug 2015 - Sep 2015
Contributions:1 push, 2 branches in 1 month
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