Unity Technologies

Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Unity Technologies$179K — $269K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of production software engineering experience in services and APIs.
  • Hands-on experience with large language models and agent systems.
  • Familiarity with agent coding tools like Claude Code or Codex.
  • Strong ability to collaborate with non-technical partners and stakeholders.
  • Comfortable navigating ambiguity and rapidly changing project scopes.
  • Focus on building sustainable solutions alongside quick wins.
  • Excellent communication skills to articulate technical concepts to non-engineers.

Responsibilities

  • Embed with partner departments to deeply understand their workflows and pain points for AI implementation.
  • Design and implement agents and workflows that automate tasks and enhance efficiency within departments.
  • Write and deploy production-grade code across various stacks including integrations and data pipelines.
  • Create and connect department-specific systems and tools to streamline operations and data exchange.
  • Conduct thorough evaluations and instrumentation after deployments to ensure reliability.
  • Collaborate with department leadership to identify automation opportunities and make informed decisions.
  • Document and share patterns from one department's deployment to facilitate future projects in others.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance
  • Commute subsidy
  • Employee stock ownership program
  • Competitive retirement and pension plans
  • Generous vacation and personal days
  • Support for new parents via leave and family-care programs
  • Office snacks
  • Mental health and wellbeing programs
  • Employee Resource Groups and assistance programs
  • Training and development opportunities
  • Volunteering and donation matching support
Full Job Description
The opportunity
Unity is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with departments across the company and transform how they work using AI, agents, and automated workflows. You will sit inside Engineering, but spend most of your time embedded with our partner functions - Finance, Legal, Marketing, People, Operations, etc. - learning how the work actually gets done today and building what is needed to make it run faster, more reliably, and with less manual effort.

You will write production code, design and deploy agents, build the integrations that make them useful, and partner with people who do not think like engineers. This is a Principal individual-contributor role for someone who can ship real software, hold their own in a room with a department's leadership, and figure out what to build when the problem statement results in ambiguity. Join us and help define how Unity puts AI agents to work across the company.

What you'll be doing
  • Embed with a partner department and learn their workflows, decision points, systems, and unwritten rules well enough to know where AI will earn its keep and where it won't.
  • Design, build, and ship agents and automated workflows that solve real problems in that department - replacing manual work, unblocking bottlenecks, and surfacing information that is currently buried.
  • Write production-grade code across the stack: integrations, services, data pipelines, agent logic, and the occasional internal UI.
  • Connect the systems the department lives in - their SaaS tools, internal services, data warehouse, and communication channels - and build the integrations that don't exist yet.
  • Run honest evaluations before anything touches a real workflow, and instrument what you ship so it stays trustworthy after launch.
  • Partner with department leadership on what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone, bringing real tradeoffs rather than pitches.
  • Bring patterns back to Engineering, so what you learn in one function makes the next deployment to another faster.

What we're looking for
  • Significant production software engineering experience - services, integrations, data pipelines, and APIs. You ship code; you don't just design it.
  • Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems: prompt and context engineering, tool use, retrieval, evals, agent loops, and failure modes. You have shipped something agentic that real people used.
  • Hands-on familiarity building with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex.
  • Strong instincts for working with non-engineering partners - you can sit in a department's planning meeting, ask the right questions, and leave with a scope they trust.
  • Comfort with ambiguity, where the right answer is often a prototype next week rather than a spec next quarter.
  • A bias toward building things that last, balancing quick wins with systems the department can rely on.
  • Effective written and verbal communication, especially the ability to explain what an agent can and can't do to people who are deciding whether to trust it.

You might also have
  • Prior Forward Deployed Engineer, internal tooling, or solutions engineering experience at a company doing serious AI deployment.
  • Experience designing evals and observability for agentic systems in production.
  • Familiarity with MCP, tool-calling frameworks, or agent orchestration platforms.

Additional information
  • International 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

*Note: 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.

Gross pay salary

$179,500-$269,300 USD

About Unity Technologies

Unity Technologies is a software company that provides a platform for creating and operating interactive, real-time 3D content. The company's platform is used by game developers, architects, automotive designers, filmmakers, and other creators to build and distribute interactive experiences. Unity Technologies was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has offices in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Learn more about Unity Technologies
Size
4,000 employees
Industry
Founded
2004

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