Staff Backend Engineer, ML Inference Systems

Unity; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 193,000 - 306,000; Full time

Job summary

Unity is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer for the Vector Gamer AI team in Mountain View, CA. You will design and operate the distributed systems that power billions of daily model inferences, with a focus on low latency and high throughput.

You’ll collaborate with ML engineers to scale online serving infrastructure on GCP and Kubernetes, and implement robust monitoring, testing, and deployment practices in a production environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale.
• Expertise in Golang for high-performance backend infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with GCP and Kubernetes.
• Strong grounding in Prometheus and Grafana for observability.
• Experience in ad tech, recommender systems, or real-time personalization.
• Familiarity with microservice architectures, Docker, and CI/CD.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade backend services and distributed systems for large-scale model inference.
• Drive the technical direction of the inference platform focusing on low latency and high throughput.
• Partner with ML engineers to scale online serving infrastructure with growing model complexity.
• Ensure reliability and efficiency using monitoring/observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana).
• Manage cloud infrastructure on GCP and orchestrate workloads with Kubernetes in production.
• Promote backend DevOps/SRE practices across testing, deployment, and monitoring.

Skills

Golang

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

GCP

Prometheus

Grafana

CI/CD

Docker

Microservices

ML platforms

Tools

NVIDIA Triton Inference Server

Job description

The opportunity

Every day, we connect billions of players with the games and experiences they love.

Our Vector Gamer AI team sits at the heart of that mission, governing ad ranking and bidding decisions across billions of daily impressions, where large-scale machine learning and real-world impact converge at scale.

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to build and operate the infrastructure those models depend on. You'll design and operate the distributed systems that power billions of daily decisions, with a focus on the performance, reliability, and scalability of inference systems.

Join us and help influence how billions of gaming experiences are discovered, monetized, and how creators are rewarded.

What you'll be doing

• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade backend services and distributed systems powering large-scale online model inference at billions of daily requests
• Drive technical direction of our inference platform, with a focus on low-latency, high-throughput serving infrastructure
• Partner with ML engineers to ensure online serving infrastructure scales with growing model complexity and inference volumes, without compromising latency or throughput
• Ensure the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of our systems in production using monitoring and observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana.
• Manage and optimize cloud infrastructure on GCP, orchestrating workloads with Kubernetes across a high-scale production environment
• Promote and implement best practices for backend service development, testing, deployment, and monitoring (DevOps, SRE).

What we're looking for

• 5+ years designing, deploying, and maintaining distributed systems at scale
• Expertise in Golang for building high-performance, low-latency backend infrastructure
• Hands‑on experience with cloud infrastructure on GCP and workload orchestration with Kubernetes
• Strong grounding in monitoring and observability tooling, including Prometheus and Grafana
• Experience in ad tech, recommender systems, real-time personalization, or other performance-critical domains
• Familiarity with microservice architectures, containerization (Docker), and CI/CD best practices
• Familiarity with machine learning platforms, workflows, and serving infrastructure

You might also have

• Experience with ML inference servers like NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.
• Familiarity with auction mechanics or bidding systems in an ad tech context.
• Experience embracing AI as a strategic advantage in engineering, following established best practices for code quality and security.

Additional information

• Relocation support is not available for this position

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.

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*Note: Certain locations require a good faith disclosure of the base salary range for the role. The actual salary for the successful candidate may differ based on location, experience, and other job‑related factors.

Gross pay salary$192,600-$305,600 USD