Principal Engineer, Enterprise AI — Technical Fellow Office

Join the Technical Fellow Office to solve hard, ambiguous problems, set the bar for technical judgment, and shape how the broader engineering organization builds — across teams and beyond our immediate department. This is Enterprise AI work: deciding which platforms, workflows, and guardrails let AI systems do real work at scale, getting them adopted by teams that don’t report to you, and knowing where the frontier is heading before the organization needs to.

If you want to work where cutting-edge AI meets production-grade engineering — and influence how an entire division builds — this is that role.

What You’ll Do

• Set technical direction: Form clear positions on architecture, model strategy, and build-vs-buy — and defend them under challenge from senior engineers who see it differently. Run design reviews that change outcomes, not just document them.
• Drive adoption: Get platforms and tooling used by teams outside your own. Understand why a team resists, and do the work to earn trust rather than mandate it.
• Define quality for AI: Own how we measure correctness in systems where a wrong answer looks like a right one. Build the evaluation methods and gates that catch degraded agent and model behavior before users do.
• Own AI cost as an engineering discipline: Routing, caching, model selection, and telemetry that make spend visible and attributable — so cost decisions are made with data, not after the invoice.
• Track the frontier: Spend real time outward — evaluating emerging models, harnesses, and techniques; maintaining a network of peers; bringing back a point of view on what matters and what doesn’t.
• Advise & de-risk: Guide complex technical decisions, surface blind spots and the novel risks of autonomous systems, and help teams adopt AI pragmatically rather than by hype.
• Build where it matters: Prototype POCs that validate strategic bets, and contribute hands-on where your involvement changes the result — including inside other teams’ codebases.
• Rotate into the business: Periodically embed with a business function (e.g., Finance, HR) for a scoped period, bringing that team onto our AI stack and telemetry before returning to the core team — a temporary, hands-on deployment, not a permanent placement.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years of hands-on engineering in software development, system design, or architecture.
• Applied AI / agentic engineering: Real experience with modern LLMs and agentic systems — context engineering, tool use, retrieval, orchestration, and evaluation — including the sharp edges: latency, cost, reliability, non-determinism, safety.
• Production AI systems: A track record of taking AI-driven capabilities from prototype to production with proper evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails.
• Adoption you can point to: Platforms or tooling you built that were taken up by teams outside your own — and what you did when they weren’t.
• Influence without authority: Evidence of forming a technical position and holding it under challenge from senior engineers who disagreed, and of moving decisions you didn’t own.
• Distributed systems at scale: Strong background in scalable, fault-tolerant services and data-intensive platforms.
• Comfortable in unfamiliar territory: Able to embed with a team you’ve never worked with, learn its context fast, and leave it better than you found it.

Mountain View, SF/Bay: $227,900 - $341,900

Bellevue, Seattle, NYC, Remote CA: $202,800 - $304,200

Rest of US: $179,500 - 269,300

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.

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/pens…