Walking into Unity’s new downtown Bellevue office feels a lot like like arriving at an exclusive restaurant: Polished timber work surfaces and angular-yet-comfortable armchairs (don’t worry, we checked) add touches of warmth to the spacious collection of offices, meeting rooms and recreational areas spread across the two floors the company now occupies at the corner of Bellevue Way and 4th Street.
The real-time 3D development company has just finished moving its 200 or so employees into the new space which, once it reaches capacity, will house around 340 workstations. Founded in Copenhagen in 2004, Unity is now headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in 27 countries throughout North and South America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The company’s Eastside presence dates back to 2009, and this latest move doubles its office space to 50,000 square feet.
A lot of digital creatives use Unity’s tools to build their creations. And by “a lot,” we mean that over 50 percent of mobile games and more than 60 percent of augmented and virtual reality content use Unity technology in some shape or form. The Bellevue office hosts teams working on graphics, machine learning and AI, engineering, finance, connected games, and mixed reality.
Global Recruiting Strategy Manager Samantha Evans highlighted the local connected games team’s role in a strategic alliance with Google Cloud.
“Together, Unity and Google are building a suite of features that will help developers create, run and scale connected games,” she said via email.
Meanwhile, the machine learning and artificial intelligence team has partnered with the Bellevue city government to identify unsafe intersections throughout the city and mitigate the risks before collisions happen.
“As an organization, we all work across different offices,” Evans said. “So being based out of Bellevue does not limit the projects Unity can work on or be part of.”
The teams have settled quickly into the new space. Graphics experts cover their whiteboards with elaborate sketches. There’s a blacked-out VR lounge; a training room that occasionally functions as a yoga studio; and a well-used gaming room featuring multiple screens, piles of consoles, couches and a shuffleboard table surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides so that it appears to float above the blustery street below.
And then there’s the cafeteria, where the company keeps three beers on tap… and kombucha... and chardonnay. In case those don’t tickle your fancy, there are bottles of red wine, too. Lunch is served a little before midday each day, and on the day Built In Seattle visited, caterer On Safari Foods delivered balsamic marinated grilled flank steak, mushroom patties, baked potatoes and Italian wedding soup.
Yup.
To quote one Unity employee who watched Built In Seattle struggle to refrain from salivating all over their colleagues’ lunches: “So you want to work here yet?”
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