Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Unity; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 228,000 - 342,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health insurance

Employee stock ownership

Generous vacation and personal days

Retirement/pension plans

Parental leave support

Job summary

Unity is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with departments across the company, transforming how they work with AI, agents, and automated workflows. You will write production code, design and deploy agents, and build integrations to reduce manual effort and accelerate decisions.

You will sit inside Engineering but partner with Finance, Legal, Marketing, People, Operations, and other teams, learning workflows and delivering solutions that run faster and more reliably.

Qualifications

• Significant production software engineering experience — services, integrations, data pipelines, and APIs.

Responsibilities

• Embed with a partner department and learn workflows, decision points, and unwritten rules.

Skills

Production software engineering

LLMs & agentic systems

Agentic coding tools

Stakeholder collaboration

Ambiguity tolerance

Long-term system design

Clear communication

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Job description

The opportunity

Unity is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with departments across the company and transform how they work using AI, agents, and automated workflows. You will sit inside Engineering, but spend most of your time embedded with our partner functions — Finance, Legal, Marketing, People, Operations, etc. — learning how the work actually gets done today and building what is needed to make it run faster, more reliably, and with less manual effort.

You will write production code, design and deploy agents, build the integrations that make them useful, and partner with people who do not think like engineers. This is a Principal individual-contributor role for someone who can ship real software, hold their own in a room with a department's leadership, and figure out what to build when the problem statement results in ambiguity. Join us and help define how Unity puts AI agents to work across the company.

What You'll Be Doing

• Embed with a partner department and learn their workflows, decision points, systems, and unwritten rules well enough to know where AI will earn its keep and where it won't.
• Design, build, and ship agents and automated workflows that solve real problems in that department — replacing manual work, unblocking bottlenecks, and surfacing information that is currently buried.
• Write production-grade code across the stack: integrations, services, data pipelines, agent logic, and the occasional internal UI.
• Connect the systems the department lives in — their SaaS tools, internal services, data warehouse, and communication channels — and build the integrations that don't exist yet.
• Run honest evaluations before anything touches a real workflow, and instrument what you ship so it stays trustworthy after launch.
• Partner with department leadership on what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone, bringing real tradeoffs rather than pitches.
• Bring patterns back to Engineering, so what you learn in one function makes the next deployment to another faster.

What We're Looking For

• Significant production software engineering experience — services, integrations, data pipelines, and APIs. You ship code; you don't just design it.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems: prompt and context engineering, tool use, retrieval, evals, agent loops, and failure modes. You have shipped something agentic that real people used.
• Hands-on familiarity building with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex.
• Strong instincts for working with non-engineering partners — you can sit in a department's planning meeting, ask the right questions, and leave with a scope they trust.
• Comfort with ambiguity, where the right answer is often a prototype next week rather than a spec next quarter.
• A bias toward building things that last, balancing quick wins with systems the department can rely on.
• Effective written and verbal communication, especially the ability to explain what an agent can and can't do to people who are deciding whether to trust it.

You might also have

• Prior Forward Deployed Engineer, internal tooling, or solutions engineering experience at a company doing serious AI deployment.
• Experience designing evals and observability for agentic systems in production.
• Familiarity with MCP, tool‑calling frameworks, or agent orchestration platforms.

Additional Information

• International relocation support is not available for this position

Mountain View, SF/Bay: $227,900 - $341,900

Bellevue, Seattle, NYC, Remote CA: $202,800 - $304,200

Rest of US: $179,500 - 269,300

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.

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.

• 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.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this Web site or directly to managers. Unity does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Unity will not pay fees to any third‑party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Unity.

Your privacy is important to us. Please take a moment to review our Prospect and Applicant Privacy Policies. Should you have any concerns about your privacy, please contact us at [e-mail].