Principal Software Engineer, Ads Infrastructure

Principal Software Engineer, Ads Infrastructure

Mountain View, CA, USA, Full-time

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The Ads Infrastructure team at Unity builds and operates the core distributed systems that power one of the largest real time advertising platforms in the world. Our infrastructure underpins every part of Unity Ads, providing the foundation for segmentation, optimization, bidding, traffic routing, experimentation, and analytics at global scale.

We focus on resilient, scalable, and cost efficient systems that process massive traffic volumes across regions with strict latency and availability requirements. The platform is built on technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Flink, Starrocks, Valkey, and other cloud native components, and supports the engineers, data scientists, and product teams that drive Unity Ads forward.

This is a senior individual contributor role with organization wide technical impact. You will own critical architectural decisions, drive long term platform evolution, and partner with the team, senior managers and directors to define the technical direction of Ads Infrastructure while remaining deeply hands on.

• Define and guide the architecture and design of large scale distributed systems, ensuring scalability, fault tolerance, cost efficiency, and long term maintainability across multi region deployments
• Take end to end ownership of critical infrastructure domains, operating services in production, participating in on call rotations, and leading deep root cause analysis of complex cross system incidents
• Drive operational excellence by establishing SLO frameworks, advancing observability and resiliency patterns, and automating reliability and capacity management across the platform
• Elevate engineering standards through rigorous design reviews, architectural alignment, performance benchmarking, and mentorship of senior and staff engineers
• Partner with leadership on long term infrastructure strategy, including capacity planning, cost optimization, and technical input to cloud vendor negotiation.

• 10 or more years of experience designing, building, and operating large scale distributed systems in high availability production environments
• Strong programming expertise with a track record of delivering production grade backend services and infrastructure systems
• Deep hands on experience with Kubernetes and cloud native architectures in GCP, AWS, or Azure, including multi cluster and multi region patterns
• Advanced expertise in distributed infrastructure including traffic management, load balancing, networking, messaging systems such as Kafka, and large scale stream or batch data processing

• Deep expertise in distributed caching, storage engines, or stateful systems supporting low latency global workloads
• Experience designing service mesh, routing, and service discovery architectures in large scale environments
• Domain knowledge of online advertising and adtech systems operating at real time bidding scale
• Strong theoretical and practical understanding of distributed systems concepts including replication, partitioning, consistency models, failure handling, and end to end performance optimization

• Relocation support is not available for this position
• Work visa/immigration sponsorship is…