Principal Engineer, Data Platform

The opportunity

Unity is looking for a Principal Engineer, Data Platform to help shape and scale the next generation of data infrastructure powering our Ads business and Unity Commons, our internal platform that supports teams across Unity.

In this role, you will operate at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, data engineering, platform architecture, and product impact. You will be responsible for designing and evolving critical data platform capabilities that enable high-throughput, reliable, and trusted data flows across Unity’s advertising ecosystem, while also supporting common internal platform services used broadly across the company.

This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who thrives on solving complex platform problems, influencing engineering direction, and building systems that serve many teams at scale. You will partner closely with engineering leaders, product teams, data scientists, infrastructure teams, and business stakeholders to create platforms that are resilient, extensible, and built for long-term impact.

What you'll be doing

• Lead the architecture and technical direction for shared platform and systems capabilities supporting Unity’s Ads business and Unity Commons.
• Design, build, and evolve scalable platform services, backend systems, infrastructure components, and internal tools used by teams across Unity.
• Work across a broad technical surface area, including distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, backend services, data platform integration, observability, reliability, automation, and developer experience.
• Partner with engineering teams across Ads, infrastructure, data, product, and internal platform organizations to identify shared needs and deliver reusable, high-leverage solutions.
• Drive the design of systems that are reliable, maintainable, secure, cost-efficient, and easy for internal teams to adopt.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives that span multiple systems, services, and teams.

What we're looking for

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale platform systems, backend services, infrastructure, or distributed systems in production environments.
• A strong generalist platform engineering background, with the ability to move across systems, services, infrastructure, tooling, and data-adjacent domains.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, performance, consistency, and operational trade-offs.
• Strong backend and systems engineering skills, including service design, API design, system integration, debugging, and production operations.
• Experience building shared platforms, internal systems, or common services that support multiple engineering teams or product areas.
• Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, container orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, automation, and modern operational practices.
• Ability to quickly understand complex existing systems, identify leverage points, and lead pragmatic improvements.
• Experience influencing technical direction across teams and organizations through credibility, collaboration, and clear communication.
• Proven ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional technical initiatives from concept through execution.

You might also have

• Experience supporting data-intensive platforms or systems, including pipelines, streaming systems, storage layers, analytics infrastructure, or data platform integrations.
• Experience in advertising technology, gaming, monetization, marketplaces, experimentation, or high-scale consumer platforms.
• Hands-on exposure to technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Airflow, Terraform, service meshes, cloud platforms, or large-scale storage systems.
• Familiarity with privacy, security, compliance, and cost-efficiency considerations in large-scale platform environments.

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

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.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this Web site 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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*Note: 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. Gross pay salary $227,900—$340,000 USD