Staff Backend Engineer, Ads Recommendation System
About The Position
Offerwall by Unity is a mobile advertising and monetization platform helping game developers increase revenue and engage users through rewarded experiences. The Staff Backend Engineer will serve as technical leader for Offer Delivery, the backend service that selects which offer a player sees, when it appears, and under what terms. Offer Delivery participates in real-time bidding as a DSP in multiformat fullscreen auctions and also retrieves input features, invokes ML ranking models, and applies targeting, pacing, and supply-side rules to select offers. The engineer will set technical vision, define architecture, influence the roadmap, and lead delivery. The role involves backend services for bidding into display auctions using OpenRTB and for direct placements outside the auction flow, as well as productionizing ranking improvements with the ML modeling team. The engineer will collaborate across auction, ML, platform, and product teams; ensure production availability and reliability; participate in on-call rotations and system monitoring; and mentor engineers while establishing engineering standards. The team uses AI tools and workflows including Claude, Codex, and LiteLLM.
Requirements
- Track record of owning a significant backend system, setting its direction, making architectural decisions, and delivering it both directly and through others.
- Demonstrated ability to design and ship large-scale, highly available, latency-sensitive distributed services with complex business logic.
- Strong proficiency in backend development using Go or Java, or clear ability to become effective in Go quickly.
- Working knowledge of gRPC and willingness to adapt to the best tool for the job.
- Practical experience with observability platforms, including logging, metrics, monitoring, or tracing.
- Experience with message bus technologies for managing complex data streams.
- Track record of building new systems amid rapidly shifting requirements and designing systems that can accommodate changing requirements, including identifying when a change warrants revising the core data flow.
- Experience driving technical work across team boundaries and developing engineers.
- Sufficient knowledge of English for professional verbal and written communication with colleagues and partners worldwide.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building recommender systems, marketplace matching, or production ads ranking systems.
- Experience building or operating a DSP, ad exchange, or real-time bidding system, with familiarity with OpenRTB, auction mechanics, or programmatic advertising.
- Working understanding of supply-side ad mediation, including waterfall versus bidding and adapter and SDK integration.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for Offer Delivery, own service architecture, and lead design for critical initiatives.
- Build, test, and ship Go and Java services that select offers for players across real-time OpenRTB display auctions and direct placements outside the auction flow.
- Work with the ML modeling team to bring ranking improvements into production, including feature retrieval, scoring data, model-serving integration, and online experiments.
- Align auction, ML, platform, and product teams on shared decisions and drive delivery across team boundaries.
- Ensure high availability and reliability of production services through on-call rotations and proactive system monitoring.
- Mentor engineers, establish engineering standards, and lead by example on code and design quality.
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance
- Commute subsidy
- Employee stock ownership
- Competitive retirement or pension plans
- Generous vacation and personal days
- Leave and family-care programs supporting new parents
- Office food and snacks
- Mental health and wellbeing programs and support
- Employee Resource Groups
- Global Employee Assistance Program
- Training and development programs
- Volunteering and donation matching program
- Potential eligibility for equity awards and company incentive plans, such as annual discretionary bonuses or sales commissions
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
