OCCA—an open source, portable, and vendor neutral framework for programming parallel architectures—is used by the U.S. Department of Energy and Shell in major scientific and engineering applications. This talk will provide insight into the development of a DPC++ backend for OCCA. Integral to this effort is the DPC++ Unified Shared Memory (USM) model. Factors influencing choices related to kernel translation and launching will also be discussed. The functional accuracy of an initial implementation of a the OCCA DPC++ backend is validated on Intel GPU hardware. Finally, ongoing validation and performance analysis efforts will be outlined, along with plans for future development.