Director, Machine Learning (San Francisco)

The opportunity
At Unity, we’re fostering a culture built on Empathy, Respect, and Opportunity. Our fast-paced and collaborative environment empowers us to tackle complex challenges, delivering real-world impact for creators and users across our ecosystem.

We’re seeking a Director of Machine Learning to lead our Ads Applied Research team—a small, senior group dedicated to shaping the future of Unity’s monetization and ad tech products. This high-impact leadership role sits at the crossroads of cutting-edge machine learning, large-scale systems, and real-time optimization. You’ll drive technical strategy, lead a world-class team, and help guide the evolution of one of Unity’s most critical business domains.

What you'll be doing

• Oversee the full lifecycle of machine learning systems powering Unity Ads, including ad delivery, bidding strategies, marketplace optimization, and targeting.
• Shape and execute the strategic roadmap for machine learning across Unity’s ads organization.
• Manage and mentor a small, high-performing team of experienced ML engineers and researchers, cultivating technical excellence and strong execution capabilities.
• Transform cutting-edge research into production-ready solutions that deliver tangible business outcomes.
• Partner with product, data science, and engineering teams to align ML initiatives with broader company objectives.
• Oversee experimentation, model evaluation, and performance tuning for production systems operating at scale.
• Establish standards for model development, deployment, monitoring, and ML operations to ensure reliability and scalability.
• Identify and shape strategic investments in data infrastructure, tooling, and research directions to maintain Unity’s competitive edge.
• Identify and shape strategic investments in data infrastructure, tooling, and research directions to maintain Unity’s competitive edge.

What we're looking for

• Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, or related fields.
• 8+ years in ML engineering or applied research, with a proven track record in leading technical initiatives and teams.
• Demonstrated success in delivering robust, scalable ML systems in high-scale domains (e.g., ad tech, recommendation systems, marketplaces).
• Deep knowledge of modern machine learning techniques, frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow), and advanced model architectures.
• Exceptional communication and leadership abilities, with the capacity to influence technical and strategic decisions across teams and functions.
• Hands-on experience designing experiments, analyzing performance, and driving system optimization.
• Familiarity with scalable cloud-based ML deployments, data pipelines, and MLOps best practices.

Additional information

• Relocation support is not available for this position.

Life at Unity
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.

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*Note: Certain locations require a good faith disclosure of the base salary range for the role. The actual salary for the successful candidate may differ based on location, experience, and other job-related factors.

Gross pay salary

$217,400 — $294,100 USD