Principal Engineer, Data Platform

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

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