[2026] Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Systems), Embodied AI/NPCs, ML Platform - PhD Early Career

The Machine Intelligence team is building an NPC system that can (1) play any Roblox game and (2) perform real-time inference efficiently enough to support deployment to all Roblox players. The Foundation AI Group is on a mission to establish Roblox as the standard for 3D foundational models (3DFMs), democratizing creation by making it simple for anyone to generate high-quality, immersive 3D experiences using AI. The AI Platform team supports hundreds of ML use cases and billions of inferences daily across Discovery, Safety, Engine, and more.

Responsibilities

Creator Services Machine Intelligence Team

• Design, build and maintain robust data pipelines to collect complex 3D game states and real-time player actions across the platform.
• Solve the feature extraction across games for NPC model in a general and scalable way and drive model training speed for novel, sophisticated deep learning architectures.
• Engineer high-performance model inference solutions to support the seamless deployment of 10s to 100s of autonomous NPCs in real-time environments.

ML Platform Team

Track 1: AI Platform Projects

• Pioneer next-generation AI tooling to enhance the efficiency, cost, and usability of ML@Roblox.
• Build and maintain core platform components: Serving Layer, Model Registry, Pipeline Orchestrator, and Training/Inference control planes.
• Design great developer experiences (paved-road templates, tooling, visualizations) to reduce time-to-production and ensure foundational AI systems are scalable and reliable.

Track 2: Distributed Inference & Systems Optimization

• Architect and implement scalable distributed inference systems for efficiently serving LLMs and Large Recommender Models at massive scale.
• Optimize our inference engine to serve millions of QPS at low latency.
• Conduct deep, low-level performance analysis and optimize ML models (using techniques like continuous batching, speculative decoding, and quantization) and systems on GPU architectures to maintain peak performance and stability.

Requirements

• Possessing or pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field, with a thesis aligned to Roblox’s research areas.
• Built end-to-end ML pipelines and managed model inference and deployment.
• Experience with novel datasets, and building real-world agentic applications.
• Scaled high-performance, high-availability architectures.
• Handled infrastructure using Kubernetes and major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

Pay

Annual Salary Range: $196,750—$243,290 USD

Schedule

Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.