Unity hiring 500 staff in 2015

Unity has long been one of the major go-to game engines in the industry. But arguably the company hasn’t had the huge scale you might expect for the team behind such a widely-used development toolset.

That’s all changed in 2015 though. Unity has made the core game engine package completely free to developers who make under $100,000 in revenue, and it now plans to make its money from new services in its professional edition, which costs users $75 a month. These include cloud build pro, analytics pro and other benefits for paying users.

To support this shift in its business, Unity has been on a mass recruitment drive. So far this year, it has hired 400 new employees across the globe. It’s a significant jump from the 175 staff it previously housed.
Employees come from 32 different countries, working in 27 locations around the world.

But this isn’t enough for an increasingly ambitious game engine firm. It still plans to bring in a further 100 staff by the end of the year. Next year it’s also opening new office spaces to house all this new talent in San Francisco and Copenhagen.

But why hire so many new employees and nearly triple its headcount? Unity’s global head of recruiting Anne Evans says its vast user base means it needs to bring in the talent to continue enhancing its tech and provide support to developers globally.

“Unity touches 600m gamers all over the world through games made using our engine, and we need to hire the best talent to drive our company, power our engine and be the most innovative in the industry,” says Evans.

Vacant roles available, to name just a few, currently include R&D product manager, software engineer, UI/UX designer, graphics programmer, network programmer, backend developer, data scientist, dev ops engineer, senior marketing manager, developer relations engineer and many more.

Much of its recruitment drive is taking place in Brighton, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Montreal, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco.

“We are looking for passionate, driven, creative, smart, funny, earnest and ebullient believers,” says Evans.

“We hire developers with talent and diverse backgrounds, as well as those passionate about our product. It’s not enough to be able to do the job; we’re looking for people who colour outside the lines.”