Freelance Remote Unity Developer Jobs in Illinois

Overview

Being good neighbors – helping people, investing in our communities, and making the world a better place – is who we are at State Farm. It is at the core of how we operate and the reason for our success. Come join a #1 team and do some good!

REMOTE:Qualified candidates living outside a 50-mile radius of a hub location listed below can plan to work remote. 

HYBRID: Qualified candidates living within a 50-mile radius of a hub location listed below should plan to spend time working from home and some time working in the office as part of our hybrid work environment.
HUB LOCATIONS: Bloomington, IL; Dunwoody, GA; Richardson, TX; or Tempe, AZ 

SPONSORSHIP:  Applicants for this position are required to be eligible to lawfully work in the U.S. immediately; employer will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work authorization (e.g. H-1B visa) for this opportunity.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of 3-5 embedded agentic engineers who work inside Product Oriented Delivery pods, helping engineers, analysts, and product owners ship twice as fast with twice the quality through agentic workflows. You'll build the agentic harness tuned to our existing infrastructure, write code alongside your team, run the developer community, and ensure a steady stream of innovation projects make it to production on Databricks

What You'll Own

• Team Leadership (30%) – Hire, manage, and grow 3-5 embedded engineers. 1:1s, career development, removing blockers. You code 30-40% of the time.
• Agentic Harness (25%) – Build the agentic harness tuned to our infrastructure – hooks, connectors, and integrations with Claude for code quality checks, artifact generation, and next-best-action guidance through the SDLC.
• Databricks Solutions (20%) – Production templates for Medallion pipelines, Unity Catalog governance, MLflow, PySpark. Not PoCs – real systems with monitoring and runbooks.
• Developer Community (15%) – Demos, office hours, pattern libraries. Measure adoption and impact.
• Production Readiness (10%) – Quality gates, automated checks, incident coaching, ET handoff.

What Success Looks Like

• Team hired, embedded in pods, and shipping agentic infrastructure
• Developer adoption >70% – teams actively using agentic tools in daily work
• Projects consistently shipping to production with proper monitoring and handoff
• Cycle time cut in half. Incidents down 50%. Measured, not estimated.
• Developer community thriving with demos, office hours, and a living pattern library
• You've developed a successor on your team

Stack

Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow, PySpark) / Anthropic Claude API / Python, SQL / AWS (Lambda, ECS, RDS) / DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana / Git / CLI tools, VS Code extensions, CI/CD hooks

Culture

• Kindness is the standard. In the code, the docs, the commit messages.
• Objective over agreement. Debate hard, commit fully.
• Agentic-first. If an LLM can augment it, we do it.
• Production or nothing. We ship.
• Blameless accountability. RCAs that teach, not punish.
• Player-coach model. Leaders build alongside the team.
• 2x2 is the mission. Measured, not aspirational.

Qualifications

Must-Haves

• Leadership: 2+ years managing engineering teams. Experience with embedded/distributed teams. Coaching mindset.
• Production (Non-Negotiable): Shipped end-to-end systems to production with real users, SLAs, and on-call. Not PoCs. 1+ year operating production ML/AI systems.
• Databricks: 2+ years production Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow, PySpark). Medallion architecture. Cost optimization.
• Agentic/LLMs: Anthropic Claude production experience (structured outputs, tool use, multi-turn). Built developer tools with LLMs. Evaluation frameworks. Prompt engineering at scale.
• Engineering: Production-grade Python. SQL expertise. CI/CD. API design. Code quality obsession. Threat modeling. Chaos engineering.
• Communication: Technical teaching. Influence without authority. Clear written communication. Stakeholder management.

Nice-to-Haves

• Developer platforms or CLI tools. DORA/SPACE metrics. Open-source contributions. Event streaming. Privacy regulations. Insurance/fintech/regulated industries. Lightweight UI skills (Streamlit, Gradio, FastAPI + HTMX).

Our Benefits

Because work-life balance is a priority at State Farm, compensation is based on our standard 38:45-hour work week!

• Potential starting salary range: $151,000 - $247,000. Starting salary will be based on skills, background, and experience. High end of the range limited to applicants with significant relevant experience and living in high cost of labor location like CA/NY/NJ/Etc. 
• Potential yearly incentive pay up to 18% of base salary

At State Farm, we offer more than just a paycheck. Check out our suite of benefits designed to give you the flexibility you need to take care of you and your family!

• Get Paid! On top of our competitive pay, you are eligible for an annual raise and bonus.
• Stay Well! Focus on you and your family’s health with our robust health and wellbeing programs. State Farm pays most of your healthcare premium, and we offer multiple healthcare plan options, including a high deductible plan. All medical plans provide 100% coverage for in-network preventative care, AND you and your family have access to vision, dental, telemedicine, 24/7 mental health professionals, and much more!
• Develop and Grow! Take advantage of educational benefits like industry leading training programs, top-notch tuition assistance programs, employee resource groups, and mentoring.
• Plan Ahead! Plan for those big moments in life with benefits like fertility/IVF/adoption assistance, college coaching, national discount programs, interactive monthly financial workshops, free financial coaching, and more. You can also start a savings account or consider financing through our State Farm Federal Credit Union!
• Take a Little “You” Time! You will have access to our generous time off policies designed so you can plan around holidays, family events, volunteering, or just to take a relaxing day off. With the opportunity to initially earn up to 20 days annually plus parental leave, paid holidays, celebration day, life leave (40 hours/year), bereavement leave, and community service/education support days, there will be plenty of time for you!
• Give Back! We offer several ways to give back through our Matching Gift Program, Good Neighbor Grant Program, and the Employee Assistance Fund.
• Finish Strong! Plan for retirement using free financial advisors and a 401(k) plan with company contributions of up to 7% of your salary.

Visit our State Farm Careers page for more information on our benefits, locations, and the hiring process of joining the State Farm team!

Qualifications:

Must-Haves

• Leadership: 2+ years managing engineering teams. Experience with embedded/distributed teams. Coaching mindset.
• Production (Non-Negotiable): Shipped end-to-end systems to production with real users, SLAs, and on-call. Not PoCs. 1+ year operating production ML/AI systems.
• Databricks: 2+ years production Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow, PySpark). Medallion architecture. Cost optimization.
• Agentic/LLMs: Anthropic Claude production experience (structured outputs, tool use, multi-turn). Built developer tools with LLMs. Evaluation frameworks. Prompt engineering at scale.
• Engineering: Production-grade Python. SQL expertise. CI/CD. API design. Code quality obsession. Threat modeling. Chaos engineering.
• Communication: Technical teaching. Influence without authority. Clear written communication. Stakeholder management.

Nice-to-Haves

• Developer platforms or CLI tools. DORA/SPACE metrics. Open-source contributions. Event streaming. Privacy regulations. Insurance/fintech/regulated industries. Lightweight UI skills (Streamlit, Gradio, FastAPI + HTMX).

Education:UNAVAILABLEEmployment Type: FULL_TIME