Senior Software Engineer, 3D Systems & AI

Unity Technologies; United States; On-site; USD 130,000 - 196,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, life & disability insurance

Commute subsidy

Employee stock ownership

Retirement plans

Vacation and personal days

Parental leave support

Office snacks

Mental health programs

ERGs (Employee Resource Groups)

Global Employee Assistance Program

Training and development

Volunteer and donation matching

Job summary

Unity Technologies in the United States is seeking an experienced Engine/Core Systems Engineer to help define runtime protocols, formats, and execution models for encoding, compressing, and replaying interactive 3D content across engines and AI models.

You will own and evolve engine subsystems from low-level C++ runtime code to high-level C# APIs across editor, build, simulation, streaming, and playback, while optimizing for bandwidth, latency, determinism, and memory.

Qualifications

• Experience building or extending game engine cores or foundational systems.
• Practical AI/ML integration into production software and model workflows.
• Ability to design modular, testable systems and ship end-to-end.

Responsibilities

• Define runtime protocols, formats, and execution models to encode, compress, and replay interactive 3D content between engines and AI models.
• Own and evolve engine subsystems across the stack from low-level C++ to high-level C# APIs for editor, build, simulation, streaming, and playback.
• Build systems to capture, serialize, stream, and synchronize scene state, assets, user interactions, and rendering data under tight bandwidth and latency constraints.
• Design interfaces and feedback loops that let AI systems inspect engine state, invoke capabilities, and validate outcomes.

Skills

Core Engine Experience

AI Systems Fluency

Architecture & Execution

High-Performance Coding

Engine-Wide Breadth

Tools

C++

C#

Serialization

Job description

The opportunity

The team behind Unity’s visionOS support, Play-to-Device, and Record & Playback is growing as we prepare for something even more ambitious: adapting PolySpatial to stream Unity content into other game engines and 3D environments — in-process, cross-process, and over the network.

We’re building systems that allow real-time 3D experiences to run, render, and interact in places they weren’t originally authored for, including other major game engines and emerging software platforms. We’re also developing new ways to encode and exchange interactive 3D content: protocols designed not only for rendering and interchange, but also for understanding, transformation, generation, and orchestration by future AI-driven tools and systems.

You’ll help invent the protocols, media formats, and runtime systems that bring interactive 3D content to novel platforms. Working at the intersection of core engine technology, graphics, networking, distributed systems, media, and AI, you’ll help define the interchange layer for the next generation of interconnected games and intelligent 3D ecosystems.

What you’ll be doing

• Help define runtime protocols, formats, and execution models to encode, compress, and replay interactive 3D content between engines and AI models.
• Own and evolve critical subsytems across the engine stack, from low-level C++ runtime code to high-level C# APIs across editor, build, simulation, streaming, and playback.
• Build systems to capture, serialize, stream, and synchronize scene state, components, assets, user interactions, and rendering data under tight bandwidth, latency, determinism, and memory constraints.
• Design interfaces and feedback loops that allow AI systems to inspect engine state, invoke engine capabilities, and validate outcomes.

What we’re looking for

• Core Engine Experience: Experience building or fundamentally extending game engine cores, middleware, or foundational systems (e.g. serialization, build pipelines, memory subsystems).
• AI Systems Fluency: Practical experience integrating AI/ML into production software, including areas such as model training, data collection, evaluation loops, agents, tool use, or model-context protocols.
• Architecture & Execution: Ability to design modular, testable systems - then implement, profile, debug, and ship them end-to-end.
• High-Performance Coding: Strong C++ and C# skills, with practical understanding of CPU caches, memory layout, allocation patterns, branch behavior, profiling, and performance tradeoffs in real-time systems.
• Engine-Wide Breadth: Hands-on experience across multiple engine domains — such as physics, animation, input, rendering, assets, or build systems — and how they interact.

You might also have

• Experience building infrastructure for training data generation, synthetic data, simulation environments, evaluation harnesses, reinforcement learning, or agentic workflows.
• Familiarity with 3D data formats and spatial content pipelines, such as USD, glTF, procedural generation, or semantic scene representations.
• Experience with MCP‑style tool interfaces, LLM agents, multimodal models, inference pipelines, embeddings, vector search, or AI systems that inspect and act on structured application state
• Knowledge of compression, streaming, replication, authority models, RPCs, state diffing, delta encoding, or network protocols for real‑time interactive systems.
• Experience with determinism, replay systems, simulation consistency, multithreading, job systems, lock‑free programming, Unity DOTS, or other data‑oriented runtime architectures.

Additional information

• Relocation support is not available for this position
• Work visa/immigration sponsorship is not available for this position

$130,400.00 - $195,600.00

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.

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.