Prior to that, he integrated a GPU rasterization engine into the Chrome web browser. Before joining Google, Ernst was a research scientist at Intel Labs, where he led the development of the Embree ray tracing kernels. He was also a cofounder and the CEO of Bytes+Lights, a start-up company that developed visualization tools for the automotive industry. He received his Diplom degree and a Ph.D in computer science from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.