Unity Technologies

Senior Backend Engineer, AI Platform & Infrastructure

Unity Technologies$135K — $203K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in distributed systems and backend services.
  • Strong backend and systems engineering capabilities, particularly in service and API design.
  • Deep understanding of distributed systems principles, focusing on scalability and fault tolerance.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud-native tech, especially Google Cloud Platform.
  • Proficient in implementing security measures like authentication and access control.
  • Interest or background in large language models and agent system design.
  • Ability to navigate projects with evolving requirements.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs critical for the platform.
  • Ensure robust access control and data security protocols are in place.
  • Enhance platform integration, focusing on data governance for AI tools.
  • Maintain and improve reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of services.
  • Set high standards for code quality, deployment, and service design.
  • Oversee end-to-end contributions to agent capability, including user interface development.
  • Collaborate with data scientists to create reusable platform features.
  • Influence the technical roadmap and direction of the platform.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance.
  • Commute subsidy for employees.
  • Employee stock ownership plan.
  • Competitive retirement and pension plans.
  • Generous vacation and personal days.
  • Parental leave and family-care support programs.
  • Complimentary snacks in the office.
  • Mental health and wellbeing support programs.
  • Opportunities for training and professional development.
  • Volunteering and donation matching initiatives.
Full Job Description
The opportunity

Unity is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and operate the platform behind an internal AI product analytics agent, and the shared services other teams at Unity build on.

This role will join the platform-facing half of the team. You will spend half of your time working on platform and infrastructure engineering: the backend services, APIs, integration surfaces, access control and operational foundations that make an internal AI product safe, fast and dependable at company scale. You will also support agent capability work; including orchestration, retrieval and the interfaces people use.

The platform runs on GCP and serves data from BigQuery to users across Unity. Access control, reliability and cost are first-order product concerns, not afterthoughts.

Note: This role is one of two we're hiring on the team. If you'd rather spend your time in the analytics data layer, modelling datasets and improving the quality of what the agent knows, take a look at our Senior Software Engineer, Analytics Data & Applied AI role instead!

What you'll be doing
  • Design, build and operate the backend services, APIs and self-service tooling that the platform and other Unity teams depend on.
  • Own access control and data security for the platform: authentication, authorisation, permissioning of the underlying datasets, and auditability.
  • Build and harden the platform's integration surfaces, including the MCP server that exposes governed data to AI tools.
  • Take responsibility for reliability, performance and cost efficiency, covering latency, scaling behaviour, fault tolerance, observability and incident response.
  • Raise the engineering bar on the codebase: service design, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and deployment safety.
  • Contribute to agent capability work end to end, including orchestration, knowledge retrieval and user-facing surfaces.
  • Work with data scientists and partner teams to turn platform needs into reusable capabilities.
  • Help set the roadmap and technical direction for the platform.


What we're looking for
  • Experience designing, building and operating distributed systems, backend services or internal platforms in production.
  • Strong backend and systems engineering skills: service design, API design, debugging and production operations.
  • A solid grasp of distributed systems fundamentals, including scalability, reliability, fault tolerance and the trade-offs between them.
  • Practical experience with cloud-native infrastructure, ideally GCP, plus container orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure as code and observability tooling.
  • Experience implementing authentication, authorisation or access control in systems handling sensitive data.
  • Experience with, or a demonstrated interest in, LLM and agent systems, particularly orchestration and workflow design.
  • A record of making progress on projects where the requirements are not fully defined.


You might also have
  • Experience building products for technical end users.
  • Experience operating data-intensive platforms such as pipelines, streaming systems, storage layers or analytics infrastructure.
  • Familiarity with privacy, security, compliance and cost management in large-scale platform environments.
  • Experience applying AI or agentic tooling to engineering workflows.


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

Zone A: $135,800 - $203,600 USD gross

Zone B: $153,400 - $230,200 USD gross

Zone C: $172,400 - $258,600 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

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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