Senior Core Engine Engineer

San Francisco, CA, USA March 17, 2026 Full Time Greenhouse

The opportunity

The team behind Unity’s visionOS support, Play-to-Device, and Record & Playback is growing as we prepare for something even more ambitious: adapting PolySpatial to stream Unity content into other game engines and 3D environments — in-process, cross-process, and over the network.
 
We’re building systems that allow real-time 3D experiences to run, render, and interact in places they weren’t originally authored for, including other major game engines and emerging software platforms. We’re also developing new ways to encode and exchange interactive 3D content: protocols designed not only for rendering and interchange, but also for understanding, transformation, generation, and orchestration by future AI-driven tools and systems.
 
You’ll help invent the protocols, media formats, and runtime systems that bring interactive 3D content to novel platforms. Working at the intersection of core engine technology, graphics, networking, distributed systems, media, and AI, you’ll help define the interchange layer for the next generation of interconnected games and intelligent 3D ecosystems.

What you'll be doing

  • Help define runtime protocols, formats, and execution models to encode, compress, and replay interactive 3D content between engines and AI models.
  • Own and evolve critical subsytems across the engine stack, from low-level C++ runtime code to high-level C# APIs across editor, build, simulation, streaming, and playback.
  • Build systems to capture, serialize, stream, and synchronize scene state, components, assets, user interactions, and rendering data under tight bandwidth, latency, determinism, and memory constraints.
  • Design interfaces and feedback loops that allow AI systems to inspect engine state, invoke engine capabilities, and validate outcomes.

What we're looking for

  • Core Engine Experience: Experience building or fundamentally extending game engine cores, middleware, or foundational systems (e.g. serialization, build pipelines, memory subsystems).
  • AI Systems Fluency: Practical experience integrating AI/ML into production software, including areas such as model training, data collection, evaluation loops, agents, tool use, or model-context protocols.
  • Architecture & Execution: Ability to design modular, testable systems - then implement, profile, debug, and ship them end-to-end.
  • High-Performance Coding:  Strong C++ and C# skills, with practical understanding of CPU caches, memory layout, allocation patterns, branch behavior, profiling, and performance tradeoffs in real-time systems.
  • Engine-Wide Breadth: Hands-on experience across multiple engine domains — such as physics, animation, input, rendering, assets, or build systems — and how they interact.

You might also have

  • Experience building infrastructure for training data generation, synthetic data, simulation environments, evaluation harnesses, reinforcement learning, or agentic workflows.
  • Familiarity with 3D data formats and spatial content pipelines, such as USD, glTF, procedural generation, or semantic scene representations.
  • Experience with MCP-style tool interfaces, LLM agents, multimodal models, inference pipelines, embeddings, vector search, or AI systems that inspect and act on structured application state
  • Knowledge  of compression, streaming, replication, authority models, RPCs, state diffing, delta encoding, or network protocols for real-time interactive systems.
  • Experience with determinism, replay systems, simulation consistency, multithreading, job systems, lock-free programming, Unity DOTS, or other data-oriented runtime architectures.

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.

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

Life at Unity
We offer a wide range of benefits designed to support employees' well-being and work-life balance. You can read more about them on our career page.

Unity [NYSE: U] is the leading platform to create and grow games and interactive experiences. Creators, ranging from game developers to artists, architects, automotive designers, infrastructure experts, filmmakers, and more, use Unity to bring their imaginations to life across multiple platforms, from mobile, PC, and console, to spatial computing.

As of the third quarter of 2024, more than 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games were made with Unity, and in 2024, Made with Unity applications had an average of 3.7 billion downloads per month. For more information, please visit Unity.

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 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.

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

This 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.

Headhunters 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.

Your privacy is important to us. Please take a moment to review our Prospect Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Policy. Should you have any concerns about your privacy, please contact us at [email protected].

#SEN #LI-LM1

*Note: 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.
 
Gross pay salary
$115,400$173,000 USD
Apply on company site

How to Get Hired at Unity

  • Unity uses Greenhouse as its ATS — optimize your resume with clean formatting, relevant keywords, and complete application fields to ensure your submission is parsed and reviewed effectively.
  • Tailor every application to the specific Unity role. With many open positions across diverse functions, generic applications are unlikely to stand out in a competitive candidate pool.
How to apply to Unity

How well do you match this role?

Check My Resume