Principal Software Engineer - Compute (Kubernetes)

About the role

A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical lead for our Kubernetes ecosystem, setting the long-term architectural strategy for a platform that manages thousands of nodes and supports millions of concurrent requests.
• Think deeply about how our internal customers consume and interact with compute, designing intuitive interfaces and tooling that simplify consumption of complex infrastructure services.
• Leverage deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, including custom controllers, operators, API server architecture, and etcd, to solve complex scaling bottlenecks and optimize our control plane.
• Architect robust security, isolation, and identity solutions that allow diverse workloads to safely coexist at scale.
• Lead the design of advanced automation, observability, and self-healing systems that minimize MTTR and maintain world-class uptime for our global compute fleet.
• Partner with engineering leadership to define the technical roadmap, balancing feature velocity against platform integrity.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence across the Compute organization through rigorous architectural reviews, code standards, and the active mentorship of senior and staff-level engineers.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure.
• Demonstrated expertise in Kubernetes internals, with a track record of modifying or extending the Kubernetes ecosystem (custom controllers, operators, upstream contributions).
• Production scale: A history of building and operating mission-critical infrastructure platforms that serve thousands of nodes or high-throughput, low-latency microservices.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native security practices, identity solutions, and container networking.
• Proven track record as a technical anchor, with the ability to communicate complex concepts, influence cross-functional stakeholders, and lead initiatives across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Strong understanding of Linux, Docker, and container orchestration technologies.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and continuous integration tools.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.

Skills

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Native Security
• Container Orchestration
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Linux
• Docker

Benefits

Roblox provides a competitive benefits package, including health insurance, retirement savings plans, and paid time off.

Pay

The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range.

Annual Salary Range $345,040—$399,420 USD

Schedule

Roblox provides a flexible schedule for roles based at headquarters in San Mateo, CA. Roles based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).