Senior Software Engineer, Backend Infrastructure

Game Companies; San Francisco (CA); On-site; GBP 56,000 - 96,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive health, life, and dental

Stock ownership

Generous vacation and personal days

Commute subsidy

Pension/retirement plans

Parental leave and family care

Employee learning & development

Volunteer & donation matching

Job summary

Unity Technologies is seeking a Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer for Unity Spark, our browser-based game editor. You’ll own CI/CD, IaC, and Kubernetes workloads, scaling real-time servers behind multi-user editing.

You’ll work with backend engineers, product, and partner infra teams, interfacing with AI coding tools and driving reliability and performance across production systems.

Qualifications

• Proven track record building backend services at scale.
• Experience running containerized workloads on Kubernetes.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines.
• On‑call experience and reliability mindset.
• Comfort with AI coding tools and code reviews.
• Strong written and verbal communication.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain the CI/CD pipelines from PR to production using GitOps.
• Own infrastructure as code for Google Cloud and Kubernetes estate.
• Scale stateful real-time workloads and autoscale server fleets.
• Write backend services and tooling to keep the platform running.
• Debug production issues across the stack and improve observability.
• Mentor engineers and raise the team’s engineering bar.

Skills

Backend at scale

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

GKE / Google Cloud

On‑call

Tools

GKE

Terraform

Kubernetes

GitOps

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Technical Engineering

5+ years

Backend Development

The opportunity

Unity Spark is our browser-based game editor, with an ambitious vision for how real-time 3D games are created, shared, and played on the web. As a Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer on the Spark team, you will be the engineer who makes our services build, ship, and scale. You will write backend code, and you will own how it reaches production on Google Cloud: the CI/CD pipelines, the infrastructure as code, the Kubernetes workloads, and the fleets of stateful real-time servers behind multi-user editing.

Our team moves fast and uses AI coding tools every day. That shifts the work from typing code to deciding what to build, checking it is right, and owning it once it is live. We value generalists who pick up whatever the product needs next, whether that is a new service, a scaling problem, or a failed deployment. You will work closely with backend engineers, product, and partner infrastructure teams, and be the go-to person when production needs to scale or is not behaving.

What you’ll be doing

• Design, build, and maintain the CI/CD pipelines that take our services from pull request to production, with GitOps-style deployment
• Own infrastructure as code for our Google Cloud and Kubernetes estate, keeping environments consistent and reproducible
• Scale stateful real-time workloads, including autoscaling server fleets, session routing, capacity planning, and safe rollouts, weighing multiple approaches and leading the design with your team
• Write backend services and tooling, including the code that keeps the platform running
• Debug production problems across the stack, from load balancing, networking, TLS, and DNS to the services themselves, anticipate failure modes, and fix the cause rather than the symptom
• Improve observability with metrics, logs, traces, and alerts, and run load tests that show where the limits are
• Use AI coding tools as a normal part of your work, review code and designs, and mentor engineers while raising the team’s engineering bar

What we’re looking for

• A track record building, operating, and owning backend services at scale in production, in at least one modern backend language
• Hands‑on experience running containerized workloads on Kubernetes, ideally on Google Cloud (GKE)
• Deep experience owning infrastructure as code (for example Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines end to end
• On‑call experience: you own what you run and fix what you find
• Sound judgment that teammates trust, comfort with ambiguity and trade‑offs, and effective written/verbal communication with technical and non‑technical colleagues
• Comfort with AI coding tools, reviewing what they produce as critically as a colleague’s code

You might also have

• Experience running stateful, real‑time, or game‑server workloads at scale
• Experience with GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux, and Helm
• Experience with cloud load balancing and edge security, including L7 load balancers, web application firewalls, and certificate management
• Experience with the Unity Engine, interactive 3D technology, or backend services for games

Additional Information

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

Base Salary Range

We determine the base salary range for this role based on your primary work location:

Zone A: £55,700 - £83,500 GBP gross

Zone B: £63,700 - £95,500 GBP gross

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.