Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Unity in Mountain View, CA, USA

Job description

• We are building the next generation of AI-driven game experiences — generative world models, neural rendering, and multi-modal understanding that turn images, text, and 3D primitives into interactive worlds. As our Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will be a core technical leader bringing state-of-the-art computer vision and multi-modal models — transformers, diffusion networks, vision-language models (VLMs), and JEPA-style architectures — from research into robust, production-grade systems.
• This is a deeply hands-on, high-impact role. You will help define the modeling and\ deployment strategy, drive architectural decisions across the ML stack, and mentor a team\ of senior and mid-level engineers. Your work will directly shape the quality, capability, and\ performance of AI features experienced by billions of players — across cloud, server, and\ on-device targets.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership
• Help set the technical vision and roadmap for computer vision and multi-modal AI models, spanning transformers, diffusion models, vision-language models, and JEPA-style generative architectures.
• Drive design and implementation of models for image and video understanding, generation, segmentation, detection, and dense prediction, as well as multi-modal reasoning over images, text, and 3D inputs.
• Make sound decisions on model architecture, training strategy, data pipelines, and evaluation — balancing quality, capability, latency, and cost across deployment targets.
• Own the path from research prototype to production: training, fine-tuning, distillation, export, and serving, with deployment spanning cloud GPUs through to efficient on-device inference where the product requires it.
• Architecture \& Research Translation
• Collaborate directly with research scientists to translate novel CV and multi-modal model architectures into deployable, well-engineered implementations.
• Design scalable systems for multi-modal inference that process diverse inputs images,
• video, text, primitives, and metadata — and produce rich outputs from semantic
• predictions to pixel-level generation.
• Track and rapidly adopt breakthroughs across the field: vision-language pretraining and
• alignment, efficient diffusion (e.g., consistency models, flow matching), efficient attention
• e.g., FlashAttention, linear-attention variants), and tokenization/representation learning
• for vision.
• Where latency or device constraints demand it, apply compression, quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation, and work with appropriate runtimes (e.g., TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, CoreML, TFLite) to meet performance budgets.
• Team \& Cross-Functional Leadership
• Lead and mentor a team of ML engineers; define engineering best practices, code review standards, and rigorous benchmarking and evaluation methodology.
• Partner with research, platform engineers, product managers, and runtime teams to align ML capabilities with product roadmaps and target-platform constraints.
• Champion a culture of measurement: define KPIs for model quality, accuracy, latency, memory, and cost, and ensure the team tracks them rigorously.

Requirements

• 6+ years in ML engineering, with significant depth in computer vision and/or multi-modal modeling.
• Proven production experience with transformer-based and diffusion-based vision models (e.g., ViT, CLIP/SigLIP-style encoders, Stable Diffusion, DETR/SAM-style architectures)
• Strong command of the full model lifecycle: data curation, training and fine-tuning, evaluation, and serving at scale.
• Familiarity with efficient attention, diffusion samplers, multi-modal fusion, and vision-language alignment techniques.
• Strong Python and modern deep-learning tooling (PyTorch); solid software
• engineering fundamentals.
• Track record of technical leadership: setting direction, influencing cross-functional partners, and growing engineers.
• Experience with world-model, video-generation, or neural rendering pipelines (NeRF,
• 3DGS, or similar).
• Experience deploying models to constrained or on-device targets, including quantization
• INT8/INT4/FP16), pruning, distillation, and runtimes such as CoreML, TFLite, ONNX
• Familiarity with mobile SoC accelerators (Apple Neural Engine, Qualcomm Hexagon/Adreno,ARM Mali) or compiler stacks such as MLIR, TVM, or XLA.
• Contributions to open-source ML frameworks or peer-reviewed CV/ML research publications.
• Background in real-time graphics or game engine pipelines (Metal, Vulkan, OpenGL ES).

Skills

Required

• 6+ years in ML engineering
• Solid software engineering fundamentals
• Track record of technical leadership

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
• Base Salary Range: We determine the base salary range for this role based on your primary work location:
• Zone A: $218,400 - $283,900
• Zone B: $194,100 - $252,300
• Zone C: $172,200 - $223,900
• 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.