Unity
Staff Backend Engineer, Ads Recommendation System
$158K–$260K
Mountain View, CA, USA +1 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 27, 2026
- Location
- Mountain View, CA, USA
San Francisco, CA, USA
About the job
Leads the architecture and delivery of Offer Delivery, a backend system that selects and serves advertising offers through real-time auctions and direct placements.
What you'll do
- Set technical direction, design and deliver Offer Delivery services, and own how targeting, pacing, and supply-side rules work on the serving path.
- Integrate ranking models and feature retrieval into production, and run online experiments with the ML team.
- Coordinate across teams, ensure service reliability and monitoring, and mentor engineers.
What they ask for
- Track record owning and delivering a significant backend system and making architectural decisions.
- Demonstrated ability to design and ship large-scale, highly available, latency-sensitive distributed services with complex business logic.
- Strong backend development proficiency in Go or Java, or clear ability to become effective in Go quickly; working knowledge of gRPC.
- Practical experience with observability platforms and message bus technologies for complex data streams.
Nice to have
- Production experience with recommender systems, marketplace matching, or ads ranking.
- Experience with DSPs, ad exchanges, real-time bidding, OpenRTB, auction mechanics, programmatic advertising, or supply-side ad mediation.
Pay
USD 200,400 - USD 260,500 base salary; USD 178,300 - USD 231,800 base salary; USD 157,800 - USD 205,200 base salary
Tools
Golang, Java, gRPC, OpenRTB, Claude, Codex, LiteLLM
AI focus
Work with ML modeling to integrate ranking improvements into production, including feature retrieval, scoring data, model serving, and online experiments; use AI tools and workflows including Claude, Codex, and LiteLLM.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative