The opportunity
Three billion people a month play something built in Unity. We're the team changing how those things get made - building AI that generates assets, writes and repairs code, and turns an idea into something playable faster than has ever been possible. Our group owns the backend and operations behind all of it: the cloud infrastructure our AI products run on, the data and experimentation platforms that tell us what works, the evaluation systems that tell us whether the AI is actually any good, and the operations that keep everything running across regions and customers. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer who is genuinely AI-native - for whom agents and AI tooling are how the work gets done rather than a productivity add-on - and who sets direction rather than waiting for it. We've built the foundations over the past few months - CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, deployment standards - and they work. The platform is stable, and we intend to keep it that way. What we have not solved is how much of understanding it still depends on people: when a metric moves, someone works out what it means; when something degrades, a human reads dashboards and makes the call; when a model changes, we find out more slowly than we should. None of that scales with the speed we're now shipping at, and none of it needs to stay manual. What makes this a Staff role rather than a senior one is that several of these problems do not yet have a defined shape, and we are asking you to give them one. We have more open directions than we can pursue. Deciding which ones are worth the team's time, convincing people you are right, and then building the thing - that is the job.
What you'll be doing
- Own how this team builds software with AI. We use AI across our workflow today and we're not satisfied with how far it goes. You'll set the standard - agentic code review and repair, generated tests that stay honest as requirements change, the tooling and patterns the team adopts because they make the work faster. Not just working this way yourself, but moving the floor for everyone, and having the judgment to tell a tool that earns its place from one that doesn't.
- Define what we measure, and rebuild observability so it explains itself. Our telemetry has gaps, and much of what we collect is ambiguous, unlabelled, or only meaningful to whoever built it. You'll own the model of system health and business outcomes across our platform, make each metric self-explanatory, and replace manual review and manual reaction with automated interpretation.
- Make diagnosis agentic, and decide how far that should go. Build the troubleshooting layer that correlates signals, proposes root causes, and takes safe automated action - so that understanding a production issue doesn't start with a person reading graphs. Where the automation stops and a human stays in the loop is a judgment call with real blast radius, and it's yours to make.
- Own the infrastructure side of evaluation, as the technical counterpart to our Quality Engineering Lead. Our products generate code, find and fix bugs, and produce art and design - output with no single correct answer. We have the beginnings of an evaluation system and it isn't mature yet. You'll make evaluation fast, repeatable and cheap enough to run continuously, working as the engineering peer of the lead who owns the methodology.
- Decide what AI does for gaming LiveOps. Live games are managed continuously after launch: events and content, player behaviour and retention analysis, monetization, live health. We think Unity's data puts us in an unusual position to make that faster, smarter and far less manual. We are early here and genuinely do not know yet what it becomes. We're not asking you to execute a plan - we're asking you to form one, defend it, and know when to abandon it.
- Make agentic systems affordable. As more of our product and our own workflow runs on inference, the economics become an engineering problem - token efficiency, routing work to the cheapest model that can do it, managing what an agent has to keep in context, and recovering agent state so a failed run resumes instead of starting over. You'll own how we measure and optimize all of it, and set the budgets the rest of us build within.
- Set technical direction for Unity AI's backend platforms. Make the architectural calls that are expensive to reverse, run technical spikes with developers on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and partner with product, design and other engineering teams to shape the roadmap rather than receive it.
- Raise the engineers around you. Design review, code review, mentoring, and the kind of technical argument that leaves the other person better at their job. We measure Staff impact partly by what the people near you are able to do a year from now.
What we're looking for
- Hands-on, current use of AI and agent tooling in your own engineering work. Genuine daily practice, not familiarity with the concepts - and ideally experience pointing agents at problems beyond code generation. Expect to talk about what you have actually built
- A track record of setting technical direction that other people followed - choosing what to build and what not to, making the case, and owning the outcome when it was expensive to be wrong
- A track record of working on problems that weren't defined when you started - framing them, moving quickly to something real, and knowing when to change course
- Experience building and shipping complex, user-facing software products at scale
- Depth in observability - monitoring, logging, alerting and debugging with tools such as Grafana - and a point of view on making telemetry interpretable rather than merely present
- An automation instinct in operational work - you have replaced a manual judgment step in production with a system that makes it for you, or cut the human effort in a detection-to-resolution loop
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform
- Backend service development, including API design, and comfort working in an established CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code environment
- Evidence of multiplying other engineers - mentoring, design review, or standards that outlived your involvement
- Ability to translate business and user needs into technical solutions
- Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to align stakeholders across disciplines and organizations
We would rather hire someone exceptional in a few of these areas than adequate across all of them. You might also have This is a broad charter, and we don't expect anyone to arrive with all of it. If you're strong across most of the above and curious about the rest, we'd like to talk.
- Experience building evaluation infrastructure for AI systems - benchmark harnesses, LLM-as-judge pipelines, or measuring model output quality at scale
- Experience with the economics of agentic systems - inference and token cost, model routing, context and memory management, or checkpointing and state recovery for long-running agent work
- Background in games, live-service operations, or player analytics
Base Salary Range: We determine the base salary range for this role based on your primary work location:
Zone A: $244,500 - $317,800 Zone B: $217,500 - $282,700 Zone C: $192,600 - $250,300
This range reflects the anticipated base salary for this position. Beyond base salary, this role may be eligible for equity awards and participation in our company incentive plans (such as annual discretionary bonuses or sales commissions). The final offer amount will depend on several factors, including geographic location and the candidate’s relevant experience, professional background, and skill set.
Benefits
At Unity, we want our team members to thrive. We offer a wide range of benefits designed to support well-being and work-life balance.
Please note: Benefits eligibility, specific offerings, and coverage vary based on the country and employment status.
While specific benefits vary, here are some of the ways we strive to take care of our eligible team members globally: Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance | Commute subsidy | Employee stock ownership | Competitive retirement/pension plans | Generous vacation and personal days | Support for new parents through leave and family-care programs | Office food snacks | Mental Health and Wellbeing programs and support | Employee Resource Groups | Global Employee Assistance Program | Training and development programs | Volunteering and donation matching program
Life at Unity
Unity [NYSE: U] is the world’s leading game engine, powering play for more than 3 billion consumers each month. The top mobile games in the world, the most played PC indie titles, the most innovative console games, and virtually all of the top XR and Web Games are developed, deployed, and grown in Unity. Unity also enables teams across industries like automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare to design, simulate, and collaborate in 3D - closing the gap between ideas and reality. For more information, please visit www.unity.com.
Unity is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment and celebrate our employees across age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law. Our differences are strengths that enable us to support the growing and evolving needs of our customers, partners, and collaborators. If you have a disability that means there are preparations or accommodations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please fill out this form to let us know.
This position requires the incumbent to have a sufficient knowledge of English to have professional verbal and written exchanges in this language since the performance of the duties related to this position requires frequent and regular communication with colleagues and partners located worldwide and whose common language is English.
This posting is intended to fill an existing vacancy, and we are committed to providing applicants with updates throughout the hiring process in accordance with applicable law.
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