Principal Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Job Description

Roblox is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the strategic vision, long-term architecture, and massive scalability of our distributed data platforms that power the platform. This role operates under high ambiguity, demanding unparalleled ownership to redefine the limits of infrastructure handling exabyte-scale workloads.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year technical strategy: Own and drive the end-to-end architectural vision for Roblox's core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems.
• Turn multi-year company strategies into concrete, production-grade infrastructure blueprints.
• Lead cross-functional alignment: Partner closely with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams across Roblox to align technical roadmaps with business-critical metrics.
• Optimize performance engine internals: Deep-dive into distributed engine internals, complex query planning, state management, serialization efficiency, and advanced memory optimization techniques to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency under peak compute loads.
• Pioneer autonomous agentic interfaces: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI/ML capabilities and large language models (LLMs) within our core data platform to deliver self-serve data discovery, automated metadata generation, and intelligent autonomous interaction layers.
• Cultivate engineering excellence: Set the baseline for code quality, architectural standards, and system robustness across the organization. Mentor staff, senior, and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, deep-dive post-incident analyses, and proactive chaos engineering validation.

Requirements

• B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience.
• 8+ years of experience building, designing, testing, and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems.
• Data Platform Depth: Expert-level mastery and a deep history of building with foundational data technologies within our tech stack: Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Hive, Airflow, or advanced Data Catalog / Metadata systems.
• Infrastructure Core Builder: A proven track record of architecting, writing, and deploying core data platform code and distributed systems from the ground up.
• Strong Engineering Foundations: Robust proficiency in Java, Go, or Scala, with a track record of writing clean, highly performant backend code.
• Cloud Fluency: Proven expertise managing, scaling, and troubleshooting complex stateful and stateless multi-cluster data infrastructure running on top of Kubernetes within AWS or GCP.
• Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: A proven track record of influencing technical direction across a large engineering organization, leading consensus on complex architectural initiatives, and championing successful multi-quarter projects.
• Extreme Ownership: A history of radical accountability. You do not wait for clean specifications in high-ambiguity environments; you actively define the technical requirements, unblock dependencies, rally engineers across pods, and steer complex projects from initial whiteboard sketch all the way to production stability.

Qualifications

• Nice To Have: Contributions to open-source projects in the data infrastructure ecosystem.
• Experience operating infrastructure at consumer-internet scale (100M+ users).

Benefits

• Equal Employment Opportunity: Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
• Reasonable Accommodations: The Company may provide reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.

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.