Staff Machine Learning Engineer

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.

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