Senior Data Platform Engineer: Scale & Reliability

Unity; Washington; On-site; USD 178,000 - 301,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health, life, and di­s­b

Commute subsidy

Employee stock ownership

Generous vacation and personal days

Job summary

Unity is seeking a Staff Engineer, Data Platform to design and scale data infrastructure powering Ads and Unity Commons. You’ll own scalable backend services, data pipelines, and platform capabilities across Unity’s ecosystem, collaborating with ads, data, infrastructure, and product teams.

You will lead cross-functional initiatives, influence engineering standards, and help shape a resilient, extensible developer experience for teams using shared platforms.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems or data platforms in production.
• Strong backend and systems engineering skills, including service design, API design, system integration, debugging, and production operations.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, performance, consistency, and trade-offs.
• Experience building shared platforms or self-service infrastructure supporting multiple engineering teams.
• Ability to quickly understand complex existing systems, identify leverage points, and lead pragmatic improvements.

Responsibilities

• Own the design, build, and evolution of scalable platform services, backend systems, and self-service tooling used across Unity.
• Work across a broad technical surface area, including distributed systems, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, observability, reliability, automation, and developer experience.
• Partner with engineering teams to identify shared needs and deliver reusable, high-leverage solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple systems and teams.
• Contribute to platform patterns, technical standards, and engineering best practices to improve consistency and quality.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

API design

Developer experience

Tools

Apache Flink

Apache Paimon

Kafka

Spark

Kubernetes

ArgoCD

Terraform

Job description

Unity is seeking a Staff Engineer, Data Platform to design and scale data infrastructure powering Ads and Unity Commons. You’ll own scalable backend services, data pipelines, and platform capabilities across Unity’s ecosystem, collaborating with ads, data, infrastructure, and product teams.

You will lead cross-functional initiatives, influence engineering standards, and help shape a resilient, extensible developer experience for teams using shared platforms.