{"id":3378540,"url":"https://alion.io/job/unity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system","title":"Staff Backend Engineer, Ads Recommendation System","company":{"id":2743,"name":"Unity Technologies","domain":"unity.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/unity-technologies","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":92,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.308,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":40,"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Mountain View, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200400,"max":260500,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":260500},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"LiteLLM","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Unity","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-27","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T15:20:18Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":6,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":6},"description":"The opportunity\nOfferwall by Unity is a leading mobile advertising and monetization platform that helps game developers maximize revenue and engage users through rewarded experiences. For over a decade, we've connected millions of players with offers that provide tangible in-app value, and we're now building the next generation of that product.\nAt the center of it is Offer Delivery, the backend service that decides which offer a player sees, when, and on what terms. It operates on two fronts: bidding in real time as a DSP into multiformat fullscreen auctions, and retrieves input features, calls our ML ranking models, and applies targeting, pacing, and supply-side rules to choose what offers gets shown.\nWe're seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to be the technical leader for Offer Delivery. You will set the technical vision, define the architecture, influence the roadmap, and drive delivery, owning how targeting, pacing, and supply-side rules are enforced on the serving path.\nThis is a meaningful role at the intersection of recommender systems, rewarded advertising, fraud prevention, and large-scale data processing. You'll work with frontier AI tools and workflows, including Claude, Codex, and LiteLLM.\nWhat you'll be doing\nArchitect & Design: Set the technical direction for Offer Delivery, owning the architecture of its services and leading design on its most critical initiatives.\nBuild & Ship : Build, test, and ship the Golang and Java services that decide which offer each player sees, across real-time bidding into display auctions (OpenRTB) and direct placement outside the auction flow.\nEvolve the Recommender: Work with the ML modeling team to take ranking improvements from idea to production, covering feature retrieval, scoring data, model serving integration, and online experiments.\nLead Across Teams: Offer Delivery sits between the auction, ML, platform, and product teams. Align them on shared decisions and drive delivery across team boundaries.\nOperate at Scale: Ensure the high availability and reliability of our production services, including on-call rotations and proactive system monitoring.\nRaise the Bar: Mentor engineers, set engineering standards, and lead by example on code and design quality.\nWhat we're looking for\nTechnical Leadership: Track record of owning a significant backend system, setting direction, making the architectural calls, and getting it delivered through others as well as yourself.\nHigh-scale distributed systems: Demonstrated ability to design and ship large-scale, highly available, latency-sensitive distributed services with complex business logic.\nCore Technologies: Strong proficiency in backend development using Go or Java (or clear ability to become effective in Go quickly). Working knowledge of gRPC with a willingness to adapt to the best tool for the job.\nObservability & Data Streaming: Practical experience with observability platforms (logging, metrics, monitoring/tracing) and message bus technologies for managing complex data streams.\nIntegration Design: Track record of building new systems amid rapidly shifting requirements. You can design systems that are stable through three requirement changes, and you know which change should revise the core data flow.\nCross-team influence & mentorship: Experience driving technical work across team boundaries and developing the engineers around you.\nYou might also have\nExperience building recommender systems, marketplace matching, or ads ranking systems in production.\nExperience building or operating a DSP, ad exchange, or real-time bidding system, with familiarity with OpenRTB, auction mechanics, or programmatic advertising.\nWorking understanding of supply-side ad mediation, such as waterfall vs. bidding and adapter and SDK integratio\nAdditional information:\nZone A: $200,400 - $260,500\nZone B: $178,300 - $231,800\nZone C: $157,800 - $205,200\nThis 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.\nThis 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.\nBenefits\nAt Unity, we want our team members to thrive. We offer a wide range of benefits designed to support well-being and work-life balance.\nPlease note: Benefits eligibility, specific offerings, and coverage vary based on the country and employment status.\nWhile 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\nLife at Unity\nUnity [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.\nUnity 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.\nPursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.\nThis 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.\nHeadhunters 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.\nYour privacy is important to us. Please take a moment to review ourProspect and Applicant Privacy Policies. Should you have any concerns about your privacy, please contact us at .","description_format":"text","description_chars":7712,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Equity","Generous vacation","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Advertising","AR & VR Software","Game Development","Developer Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-28T03:48:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":6,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":260500,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/unity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/unity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T15:38:38Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21704,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2743},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2743"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Funity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Funity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Funity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/unity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Funity-technologies-staff-backend-engineer-ads-recommendation-system"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3378540}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"unity.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3378540},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}