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Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

External
Unity logoUnity · San Francisco, CA
Full-timeOn-site3d ago
LeadershipLessLLMsObservabilityUnity
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About the role

Unity is hiring a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with departments across the company and transform how they work using AI, agents, and automated workflows. You will sit inside Engineering, but spend most of your time embedded with our partner functions - Finance, Legal, Marketing, People, Operations, etc. - learning how the work actually gets done today and building what is needed to make it run faster, more reliably, and with less manual effort. You will write production code, design and deploy agents, build the integrations that make them useful, and partner with people who do not think like engineers. This is a Principal individual-contributor role for someone who can ship real software, hold their own in a room with a department's leadership, and figure out what to build when the problem statement results in ambiguity. Join us and help define how Unity puts AI agents to work across the company.

Responsibilities

  • Embed with a partner department and learn their workflows, decision points, systems, and unwritten rules well enough to know where AI will earn its keep and where it won't.
  • Design, build, and ship agents and automated workflows that solve real problems in that department - replacing manual work, unblocking bottlenecks, and surfacing information that is currently buried.
  • Write production-grade code across the stack: integrations, services, data pipelines, agent logic, and the occasional internal UI.
  • Connect the systems the department lives in - their SaaS tools, internal services, data warehouse, and communication channels - and build the integrations that don't exist yet.
  • Run honest evaluations before anything touches a real workflow, and instrument what you ship so it stays trustworthy after launch.
  • Partner with department leadership on what to automate, what to augment, and what to leave alone, bringing real tradeoffs rather than pitches.
  • Bring patterns back to Engineering, so what you learn in one function makes the next deployment to another faster.

Requirements

  • Significant production software engineering experience - services, integrations, data pipelines, and APIs. You ship code; you don't just design it.
  • Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems: prompt and context engineering, tool use, retrieval, evals, agent loops, and failure modes. You have shipped something agentic that real people used.
  • Hands-on familiarity building with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex.
  • Strong instincts for working with non-engineering partners - you can sit in a department's planning meeting, ask the right questions, and leave with a scope they trust.
  • Comfort with ambiguity, where the right answer is often a prototype next week rather than a spec next quarter.
  • A bias toward building things that last, balancing quick wins with systems the department can rely on.
  • Effective written and verbal communication, especially the ability to explain what an agent can and can't do to people who are deciding whether to trust it.
  • You might also have
  • Prior Forward Deployed Engineer, internal tooling, or solutions engineering experience at a company doing serious AI deployment.
  • Experience designing evals and observability for agentic systems in production.
  • Familiarity with MCP, tool-calling frameworks, or agent orchestration platforms.
  • Additional information
  • International relocation support 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.Please note: Benefits eligibility, specific offerings, and coverage vary based on the country and employment status.Life at UnityUnity is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment and celebrate our employees across age, race, color, ancestry, nHealth insurancePaid time offEquity / stock options

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