Principal Software Engineer, Ads Infrastructure

The opportunity
The Ads Infrastructure team at Unity builds and operates the core distributed systems that power one of the largest real‑time advertising platforms in the world. Our infrastructure underpins every part of Unity Ads, providing the foundation for segmentation, optimization, bidding, traffic routing, experimentation, and analytics at global scale.

We focus on resilient, scalable, and cost‑efficient systems that process massive traffic volumes across regions with strict latency and availability requirements. The platform is built on technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink, Starrocks, Valkey, and other cloud‑native components, and supports the engineers, data scientists, and product teams that drive Unity Ads forward.

This is a senior individual‑contributor role with organization‑wide technical impact. You will own critical architectural decisions, drive long‑term platform evolution, and partner with the team, senior managers, and directors to define the technical direction of Ads Infrastructure while remaining deeply hands‑on.

What you’ll be doing

Define and guide the architecture and design of large‑scale distributed systems, ensuring scalability, fault tolerance, cost efficiency, and long‑term maintainability across multi‑region deployments.

Take end‑to‑end ownership of critical infrastructure domains, operating services in production, participating in on‑call rotations, and leading deep root‑cause analysis of complex cross‑system incidents.

Drive operational excellence by establishing SLO frameworks, advancing observability and resiliency patterns, and automating reliability and capacity management across the platform.

Elevate engineering standards through rigorous design reviews, architectural alignment, performance benchmarking, and mentorship of senior and staff engineers.

Partner with leadership on long‑term infrastructure strategy, including capacity planning, cost optimization, and technical input to cloud‑vendor negotiation.

What we’re looking for

10 or more years of experience designing, building, and operating large‑scale distributed systems in high‑availability production environments.

Strong programming expertise with a track record of delivering production‑grade backend services and infrastructure systems.

Deep hands‑on experience with Kubernetes and cloud‑native architectures in GCP, AWS, or Azure, including multi‑cluster and multi‑region patterns.

Advanced expertise in distributed infrastructure including traffic management, load balancing, networking, messaging systems such as Kafka, and large‑scale stream or batch data processing.

You might also have

Deep expertise in distributed caching, storage engines, or stateful systems supporting low‑latency global workloads.

Experience designing service mesh, routing, and service‑discovery architectures in large‑scale environments.

Domain knowledge of online advertising and ad‑tech systems operating at real‑time bidding scale.

Strong theoretical and practical understanding of distributed systems concepts including replication, partitioning, consistency models, failure handling, and end‑to‑end performance optimization.

Additional information

Relocation support is not available for this position.

Work visa/immigration sponsorship is not available for this position.

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. Specific benefits vary by country and employment status.

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 such as automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare to design, simulate, and collaborate in 3D—closing the gap between ideas and reality.

Equal Employment Opportunity
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 requires accommodations, please let us know.

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

This position requires sufficient knowledge of English for professional verbal and written communication with colleagues and partners worldwide.

Head‑hunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes or CVs through this website or directly to managers. Unity does not accept unsolicited headhunter or agency resumes and will not pay fees to any third‑party agency without a signed agreement.

Your privacy is important to us. Please review our Prospect and Applicant Privacy Policies. If you have concerns about your privacy, contact us at DPO@unity.com.

Salary
$250,000—$340,000 USD (actual compensation may vary by location, experience, and other factors).

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