Unity Logo

Unity

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Posted 8 Days Ago
Hybrid
Mountain View, CA, USA
172K-284K Annually
Entry level
Hybrid
Mountain View, CA, USA
172K-284K Annually
Entry level
Lead end-to-end machine learning architecture, production systems, forecasting, probabilistic modeling, experimentation, and agentic AI development. Build models for acquisition cost, lifetime value, ROAS, demand, and market outcomes; establish reproducible data and model pipelines; create evaluation harnesses for LLM agents; and own calibration, feedback loops, measurement, and cost controls. Mentor cross-disciplinary engineers and influence technical strategy across teams.
The summary above was generated by AI
The opportunity

Unity is building next-generation intelligence systems for gaming: systems that help AI-native teams understand the market and get the most out of the frontier models.


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


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.


Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Unity does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Unity will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Unity.
Your privacy is important to us. Please take a moment to review our
Prospect and Applicant Privacy Policies. Should you have any concerns about your privacy, please contact us at [email protected].

HQ

Unity San Francisco, California, USA Office

San Francisco, CA, United States

Unity San Francisco, California, USA Office

Work at Unity includes a ton of flexibility, depending on your role, the needs of your team and ultimately the way you and your team work best together.

Similar Jobs

Yesterday
Easy Apply
Remote or Hybrid
United States
Easy Apply
234K-349K Annually
Expert/Leader
234K-349K Annually
Expert/Leader
eCommerce • Healthtech • Kids + Family • Retail • Social Media
Own the strategy, architecture, development, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement of production personalization and recommendation systems. Build custom embeddings, ranking models, and shared representations across feeds, search, and recommendations. Lead ambiguous problems from concept to measurable customer impact, establish AI evaluation standards, partner with product and data teams, make cross-team technical decisions, and coach senior engineers.
Top Skills: AirflowAWSAws SagemakerBedrock AgentcoreClaude CodeCoderabbitDatadogDbtDeep LearningDevinGithub ActionsHexIncident.IoIterableKotlinKubernetesLangchainLaunchdarklyLinearMatrix FactorizationMaximMlflowMySQLPackwerkPandasPythonPyTorchRuby on RailsRankingReactRetrievalScikit-LearnShopifySidekiqSigmaSnowflakeSwiftTerraformTypescriptWardenWarpstreamWeaviateXgboost
2 Days Ago
Hybrid
Santa Clara, CA, USA
176K-308K Annually
Entry level
176K-308K Annually
Entry level
Artificial Intelligence • Cloud • HR Tech • Information Technology • Productivity • Software • Automation
Build cloud-based AI and machine learning solutions for intelligent enterprise services. Collaborate with developers, product managers, product owners, and quality engineers to design, implement, test, and deliver scalable software. Apply AI/ML techniques, high-performance algorithms, object-oriented programming, modular design, unit testing, profiling, and code optimization to improve enterprise workflows and user experiences.
Top Skills: Artificial IntelligenceCloud ComputingJavaMachine LearningObject-Oriented ProgrammingPythonUnit Testing
3 Days Ago
Easy Apply
Remote or Hybrid
Santa Clara, CA, USA
Easy Apply
158K-225K Annually
Senior level
158K-225K Annually
Senior level
Cloud • Information Technology • Security • Software • Cybersecurity
Build and operate production LLM-powered agents and machine learning systems for customer risk identification and threat detection. Translate security heuristics into agent logic, collaborate with threat researchers, develop data requirements and pipelines, evaluate precision and recall, and deploy solutions through CI/CD. The role also requires production reliability ownership, observability, incident debugging, cloud infrastructure expertise, and senior staff-level technical leadership.
Top Skills: AthenaAWSCi/CdDockerElasticsearchLangchainLanggraphLlm AgentsNumpyOpensearchPandasPolarsPrestoPythonSQL

What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.

Key Facts About San Francisco Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
  • Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
  • Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account