Staff Machine Learning Engineer

The opportunity

At Unity, we’re committed to building a culture grounded in Empathy, Respect, and Opportunity. Within our fast-paced and collaborative environment, we’re tackling complex challenges that drive meaningful impact for creators and users across our ecosystem. Our Ads Applied Research team plays a crucial role in shaping the future of Unity’s monetization products through cutting-edge machine learning and optimization strategies.

We are seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to make significant contributions to the next generation of ML systems for Unity Ads. In this role, you will focus on building the next-generation machine learning platform that powers our high-scale ad-tech models, from training to inference. You will be deeply involved in the design, development, and deployment of machine learning models and the underlying platform, collaborating closely with product, engineering, and research teams to advance our ML capabilities.

What you'll be doing

• Design, develop, and deploy scalable, production-grade machine learning systems and the platform components that support them, to optimize ad delivery, bidding strategies, and user engagement. (Adapted from "Architect and deploy scalable, production-grade machine learning systems")
• Contribute significantly to the technical roadmap and design of our ML platform, focusing on solutions for training and inference of high-scale ad-tech models.
• Translate state-of-the-art research into practical, scalable solutions for our ML platform and models, ensuring Unity remains at the forefront of ML performance and innovation in the ad tech space.
• Partner cross-functionally with data science, product, and engineering teams to align ML platform capabilities and model development with strategic business goals.
• Collaborate on defining and refining requirements for data infrastructure, MLOps tooling, and processes to support advanced ML initiatives and the ML platform. (Adapted from "Define requirements for data infrastructure, tooling, and processes")
• Promote and implement best practices for model development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and overall MLOps within the new platform. (Adapted from "Promote best practices for model development, testing, deployment, and monitoring")
• Specifically focus on building and enhancing the machine learning platform capabilities for training, versioning, deploying, and serving high-scale ad-tech models, leveraging technologies such as Golang for performance-critical services and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server for optimized model serving.

What we're looking for

• Advanced degree (MS or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field—or equivalent practical experience.
• Proven track record of delivering impactful ML solutions and platform components in production, particularly in large-scale, high-throughput systems (e.g., ad tech, recommendation systems, marketplaces).
• Deep expertise in Python and machine learning frameworks/tools (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow), and a strong understanding of modern model architectures.
• Experience with Golang for building high-performance ML systems/infrastructure is highly desirable.
• Experience in building and scaling ML platforms, including aspects of MLOps from model training to optimized inference systems, with hands-on experience with NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to formulate and validate complex hypotheses using large datasets.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of articulating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience contributing to ML initiatives (adapted from "leading ML initiatives") and a passion for mentoring other engineers (adapted from "mentoring other engineers or researchers").
• Familiarity with data pipelines, robust MLOps practices (derived from "model ops"), and cloud ML deployment (e.g., model serving, monitoring).

Additional information

• Relocation support is not available for this position.

Life at Unity

As of the third quarter of 2024, more than 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games were made with Unity, and in 2024, Made with Unity applications had an average of 3.7 billion downloads per month. For more information, please visit Unity.

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.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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.

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