Staff Engineer, Data Platform

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

The opportunity

Unity is looking for a Staff Engineer, Data Platform to help build and scale the data infrastructure powering our Ads business and Unity Commons, our internal platform that supports teams across Unity.

In this role, you will work at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, data engineering, and platform architecture. You will own and evolve critical data platform capabilities that enable high-throughput, reliable, and trusted data flows across Unity's advertising ecosystem, while also supporting common internal services used broadly across the company.

This is a senior individual-contributor role for an engineer who thrives on solving complex platform problems, raising the technical bar, and building systems that serve many teams at scale. You will partner closely with engineers, product managers, data scientists, infrastructure teams, and downstream data consumers to deliver platforms that are resilient, extensible, and easy to adopt.

What You'll Be Doing

• 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 across Ads, infrastructure, data, and product to identify shared needs and deliver reusable, high-leverage solutions.


• Provide hands-on technical leadership for ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives that span multiple systems and teams.


• Contribute to platform patterns, technical standards, and engineering best practices that improve consistency and quality across the organization.

What We’re Looking For

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, backend services, or data platforms in production environments.


• Strong backend and systems engineering skills, including service design, API design, system integration, debugging, and production operations.


• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, performance, consistency, and operational trade-offs.


• Experience building shared platforms, internal systems, or self-service infrastructure that supports multiple engineering teams.


• Ability to quickly understand complex existing systems, identify leverage points, and lead pragmatic improvements.

You might also have

• Experience supporting data-intensive platforms or systems, including pipelines, streaming systems, storage layers, or analytics infrastructure.


• Hands-on exposure to technologies such as Apache Flink, Apache Paimon, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, or Terraform.


• Experience in advertising technology, gaming, monetization, marketplaces, or high-scale consumer platforms.

Base Salary Range:

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

• Zone A: $157,800 - $236,800 USD gross


• Zone B: $178,300 - $267,500 USD gross


• Zone C: $200,400 - $300,600 USD 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.