Staff Software Engineer, AI Authoring

Unity; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Commute subsidy

Employee stock ownership

Vacation & personal days

Parental leave

Office snacks

Mental health programs

Employee Resource Groups

Volunteer program

Training & development

Donation matching

Job summary

Unity seeks a Staff Software Engineer to raise the bar on reliability, scalability, and performance for AI authoring products. You will lead DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and IaC efforts across Unity AI platforms, enabling robust asset generation and ML-driven tools for real-time 3D game creation.

You'll collaborate across product and design teams, shaping technical strategy and architecture while pushing for secure, observable, and cost-efficient backend solutions in multi-cloud environments

Qualifications

• Experience shipping cloud backend software at scale.
• Hands-on with Azure or Google Cloud.
• Proven observability and monitoring experience (Grafana, logs).

Responsibilities

• Influence product roadmap with cross-team partners.
• Design scalable Unity AI backend platforms.
• Improve reliability, performance, and security of backend systems.
• Run spikes for Azure and Google Cloud needs.
• Define infrastructure-as-code and deployment best practices.

Skills

Cloud architecture

Observability

Communication

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Helm

CI/CD (Argo, GitHub Actions)

Azure

Google Cloud

Job description

The opportunity

At Unity, we're shaping the future of real-time 3D technology by building AI to transform how games are created and experienced. From intelligent authoring tools to new ways of interacting with content, we're engineering the next generation of pipelines that make 3D game development faster, more immersive, and more efficient.

We're seeking a versatile, self-driven Staff Software Engineer to raise the bar on reliability, scalability, performance, and maintainability of our AI authoring products. You'll drive operational excellence via DevOps best practices, including CI/CD automation, Kubernetes management, infrastructure-as-code, agentic troubleshooting, and robust disaster recovery strategies.

You'll establish cross-team standards for infrastructure and deployments, build a trustworthy A/B testing framework, manage software releases with client-server compatibility in mind, and drive observability across system health and business metrics. The systems you build will span high-level architecture down to hands-on implementation, powering asset generation, LLM inference, and the ML-driven tools that bring AI-assisted game creation to life.

What You'll Be Doing

• Partner closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to influence the product roadmap.
• Contribute to technical strategy and architectural decisions for Unity AI and backend platforms, balancing short-term delivery with long-term product health.
• Design and implement sustainable, scalable solutions for Unity AI products, pushing the boundaries of the Unity Editor with cutting-edge AI agent technologies.
• Improve the reliability, performance, observability, security, and cost-efficiency of our backend systems, and support investigations into issues like performance regressions and network latency through strong observability and monitoring.
• Run technical spikes with developers to address application infrastructure needs on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
• Build and mature the infrastructure and processes for promoting application code from development to production, writing high-quality, maintainable infrastructure-as-code and Helm deployments, and defining best practices for Terraform Cloud, Helm, and Kubernetes.

What We're Looking For

• Experience building and shipping complex, user-facing software products at scale
• Experience delivering and supporting cloud backend services using Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm, and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Argo, GitHub Actions)
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform
• Proven track record in observability, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and debugging tools such as Grafana to ensure system reliability and performance
• Strong grasp of software delivery best practices and network security, paired with a quality-first mindset
• Ability to translate business and user needs into technical solutions
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to align stakeholders across disciplines and organizations

You might also have

• Exposure to ML infrastructure or LLM inference deployment
• Backend service development experience, including API design
• Familiarity with networking, caching, real-time data pipelines, and relational databases such as PostgreSQL
• Familiarity with languages such as C#/.NET, Python, or Go
• Familiarity with Unity or similar 3D engines

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

Base Salary Range

Zone A: $218,400 - $283,900

Zone B: $194,100 - $252,300

Zone C: $172,200 - $223,900

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.

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 and 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.