Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Advertiser Growth

Unity Enterprise; Mountain View, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 166,000 - 273,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health insurance

Commuter subsidy

Employee stock ownership

Competitive retirement plans

Generous vacation

Parental leave

Office snacks

Mental Health programs

Employee Resource Groups

Training & development

Volunteer matching

Job summary

Unity is seeking a senior backend engineer to own GenAI-driven creative asset generation, budget pacing, and high-scale billing for a global ad-tech marketplace. You will design robust systems that govern variable spend, ensure financial integrity, and enable fast experimentation to drive advertiser ROI.

You will lead backend teams, partner with data science and platform engineers, and deliver resilient, secure, and scalable infrastructure across multi-region deployments in a fast-growing

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in computer science or relevant engineering field or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years on ads delivery systems.
• Experience building and operating low-latency backend systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and optimize budget pacing controllers across time zones and spikes.
• Lead backend integration of GenAI models for asset generation.
• Build scalable experimentation infrastructure including A/B testing and holdouts.
• Architect high-throughput billing pipelines with strong data accuracy.
• Analyze datasets to tune pacing, billing logic, and marketplace health.

Skills

Ads delivery

Budget pacing

GenAI backend

Experimentation platforms

Billing pipelines

Real-time processing

Technical leadership

Code security

Education

Advanced CS degree or equivalent

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Spark

Job description

The opportunity

At Unity, we are building a world-class ad-tech ecosystem that connects billions of users with the creators and experiences they love.

The Advertiser Growth team is the engine of this mission, ensuring that as our marketplace expands, advertisers have the intelligent tools, robust infrastructure, and rigorous experimentation frameworks needed to scale their impact.

In 2026, our roadmap is defined by three transformative pillars: Foundation, Smart, and Intelligence.

This role is unique in its technical breadth, sitting at the intersection of financial execution, creative innovation, and marketplace science. You will architect the GenAI systems that build high-performing creatives, design the pacing algorithms that manage multi-million dollar budgets, ensure our billing pipelines handle massive scale with zero-fault tolerance, and build the experimentation infrastructure that allows us to scientifically evolve the marketplace. This is a high-stakes role where your technical leadership directly governs Unity's financial integrity and the long-term growth of our ecosystem.

What you’ll be doing

• Next-Gen budget pacing: Design and optimize sophisticated pacing controllers (PID, probabilistic forecasting) to smooth advertiser spend across diverse time zones and traffic spikes, ensuring optimal delivery and marketplace stability.
• Creative GenAI infrastructure: Lead the backend integration of Generative AI models (Diffusion, LLMs) to automate the creation of high-performing image and video assets tailored to specific campaign goals and formats.
• Marketplace experimentation engine: Build and scale the infrastructure for high-velocity experimentation, including A/B testing, switchback tests, and long-term holdouts to measure the impact of marketplace changes on advertiser ROI and platform health.
• High-Scale billing reliability: Architect and maintain high-throughput billing pipelines that process billions of events with 100% accuracy, bridging the gap between real-time ad delivery and mission-critical financial reconciliation.
• Scientific optimization: Analyze complex financial and marketplace datasets to refine the trade-off between spend velocity and advertiser performance, using experimentation results to tune pacing and billing logic.

What we’re looking for

• Advanced degree in computer science or relevant engineering-related field or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years working on ads delivery systems.
• Extensive experience building and operating large-scale, low-latency backend systems using languages like Java, Go, or Scala.
• Deep familiarity with building or maintaining budget control systems, feedback loops, or spend-prediction algorithms.
• Proven experience building or scaling experimentation platforms, with a deep understanding of variance reduction, interference/network effects, and metric design in a marketplace context.
• A track record of working on mission-critical pipelines (like billing, payments, or clearinghouses) where data precision, idempotency, and fault tolerance are paramount.
• Experience or strong technical interest in building the backend workflows required to serve, scale, and store Generative AI models for creative asset generation.
• Proficiency with real-time stream processing (Kafka, Flink, or Spark) specifically applied to event-based charging and real-time performance feedback.
• A proven ability to lead complex, multi-quarter technical roadmaps and mentor senior engineers in a high-growth environment.
• You might also have Experience embracing AI as a strategic advantage in engineering, following established best practices for code quality and security.

Salary

• Zone A: $210,300 - $273,400 USD
• Zone B: $187,200 - $243,300 USD
• Zone C: $165,600 - $215,200 USD

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

• 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.

Equal Opportunity Statement

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.

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.