Backend Engineer Jobs in California

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

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.

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