Unity Technologies

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Unity Technologies • $218K — $283K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of direct experience in machine learning with full ownership of production systems.
  • Expertise in performance marketing or ad-tech modeling related to commercial outcomes.
  • Strong understanding of probabilistic prediction methodologies.
  • Experience with LLM-based agent systems in a production environment.
  • Proficient in Python and modern ML tools, with foundational knowledge of various data systems.
  • Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and mentor engineers.
  • Experience in a startup or fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

  • Set the technical vision and architecture for the ML platform, covering all aspects of data and model management.
  • Ensure reproducibility and auditability of model outputs through stringent versioning practices.
  • Define and promote engineering best practices for agentic systems development.
  • Mentor a diverse cross-disciplinary team of engineers.
  • Collaborate with product teams to transform expert knowledge into actionable training signals.
  • Develop predictive models for key business metrics derived from complex data sources.
  • Design robust online experimentation frameworks with clear human oversight.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance
  • Commute subsidy and office food snacks
  • Employee stock ownership and competitive retirement plans
  • Generous vacation and personal days along with family-care support
  • Mental Health and Wellbeing programs
  • Training and development opportunities including volunteering and donation matching programs
Full Job Description
The opportunity

We are hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead this effort. You will own the end-to-end architecture, build pipelines, systems, and models, and scale a cross-disciplinary team of engine developers, game developers, and machine learning engineers. The work spans market forecasting, outcome prediction, multimodal content understanding, evaluation, and agentic systems.
What you'll be doing

Technical leadership
  • Set the technical vision and architecture for our ML platform, from data ingestion, semantic layer and feature stores through model registry, evaluation and serving.
  • Make the calls that keep every model output reproducible and auditable: versioned data snapshots, model and prompt versions, and cost tracked per decision.
  • Define, lead, and spearhead engineering practices for the agentic era, including agentic development workflows and evaluation methodologies.
  • Mentor engineers from different backgrounds.
  • Partner with different functional teams and disciplines to translate expert human judgment into training signals. Shape the roadmap with the product team.


Modeling
  • Build predictors of commercial outcomes such as user acquisition cost, lifetime value and return on ad spend from large, noisy, multi-source signals.
  • Build forecasting models over market signals that detect emerging demand and estimate when a window opens, peaks and closes.
  • Deliver every prediction as a calibrated range with stated confidence, and own the ranking and portfolio logic that turns predictions into recommendations within a budget.


Experimentation and agentic systems
  • Design online experimentation with guardrails, safe exploration and clear human decision points.
  • Build evaluation harnesses for LLM-based agents, including automated playtesting and multimodal assessment of generated content.
  • Orchestrate frontier-model agents in production with strict data boundaries and cost control.


Calibration and measurement
  • Own the feedback loop that scores predictions against realized outcomes and corrects bias, coverage and signal weighting over time.
  • Make the system report its own error in plain language so that creators and internal stakeholders can trust it.

What we're looking for
  • Experience in machine learning with a track record of owning production ML systems end to end, from data to serving to measured business outcome.
  • Deep experience in performance marketing or ad-tech modeling: predicting acquisition cost, lifetime value, return on ad spend, retention or comparable outcomes.
  • Strong grounding in probabilistic prediction and calibration: quantile or interval prediction, coverage, bias correction and backtesting of forecasts.
  • Experience building LLM-based agent systems in production: orchestration, evaluation harnesses, prompt and model versioning, and cost control.
  • Strong Python and modern ML tooling, plus solid data systems fundamentals across a relational store, a columnar analytics store and an event stream.
  • Proven ability to drive technical direction across teams, mentor senior engineers, and influence decisions without formal authority.
  • Comfort building in a zero-to-one environment.
You might also have
  • Experience in mobile game user acquisition, LiveOps or monetization, on the studio or publisher side.
  • Experience with Unity or another game engine, or with automated and bot-driven playtesting.
  • Time-series and demand forecasting experience over noisy, multi-source market signals.
  • Experience with the Claude Agent SDK, Codex or similar frameworks for multi-agent software production.
  • Hands-on experience with BigQuery, ClickHouse, Kafka, Postgres, pgvector or their equivalents.
  • Publications or open-source contributions in forecasting, causal inference, calibration or agentic systems.


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

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.

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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