Unity Technologies SF
Machine Learning Engineer, Next-Generation Recommendation Systems
New York, New York · Internship
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~45% per draw at Level III). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$10,317 more — $137,717 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $137,717 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Green-card filing pattern in this occupation
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- Recommendation and ranking systems are the core of this work: predicting user value, optimizing bids, and delivering outcomes for advertisers at massive scale.
- The frontier has shifted - large language models, reinforcement learning from human feedback, and agentic AI are reshaping what recommendation systems can do.
- We are looking for PhD graduates who have worked at that frontier and want to bring those ideas into production systems that matter.
Responsibilities
- Develop user understanding systems - conversion prediction, behavioral modeling, and value estimation - that operate across billions of impressions.
- Design and run rigorous experiments using causal inference, A/B testing, and offline evaluation frameworks to measure and improve model quality.
- Partner with engineering to bring research ideas into production, working across the full pipeline from training data to deployed model.
- Relocation support is not available for this position
- Our differences are strengths that enable us to support the growing and evolving needs of our customers, partners, and collaborators.
Requirements
- Experience working with large-scale data and ML systems, whether through research or industry internships.
- familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- A track record of rigorous, high-quality research - publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, RecSys, ACL, WWW, or similar) are a strong signal.
- Industry experience in ads, recommendation, or user understanding systems (internship experience counts).
- Hands-on experience with production ML pipelines - training at scale, feature engineering, or experimentation infrastructure.
- Experience applying LLMs or generative models to ranking, retrieval, or structured prediction problems.
- Familiarity with agentic AI approaches - multi-step reasoning, tool use, or human-AI collaboration frameworks.
Skills
- Apply reinforcement learning and optimization techniques to bidding strategy, auction dynamics, and real-time ad delivery.
- Communicate findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders across engineering, product, and business teams.
Compensation
- This range reflects the anticipated base salary for this position.
Benefits
- 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.
- Unity also enables teams across industries like automotive, manufacturing, and healthcare to design, simulate, and collaborate in 3D - closing the gap between ideas and reality.
- 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.
- Design, build, and evaluate next-generation ranking and recommendation models that incorporate LLMs, RLHF, and preference learning to improve ad relevance and user experience.
Company info
- This posting is intended to fill an existing vacancy, and we are committed to providing applicants with updates throughout the hiring process in accordance with applicable law.
- We are building the next generation of these systems.
- At Unity, we want our team members to thrive.
Equal opportunity
- equal opportunity employer.
This listing is sourced directly from Unity Technologies SF's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.