Principal Software Engineer - Economy ML (Data Systems)

About the role

The Principal Software Engineer - Economy ML (Data Systems) is responsible for architecting, building, and deploying high-scale, reliable real-time and batch data systems for personalization, search, and recommendation across various product surfaces in Roblox's Marketplace, Developer Monetization, and Payments ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Act as data engineering lead for Economy ML, setting standards for batch vs streaming feature pipelines, table design, observability, and documentation used across the Economy group.
• Work as a hands-on contributor on our data systems to power content recommendation, search, and personalization across Economy product surfaces.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and ML engineering counterparts to prioritize data initiatives that unlock top-line business goals and reduce tech debt in existing datasets and pipelines.
• Mentor other DE/ML engineers on best practices for schema design, client logging, experimentation data, and feature pipelines, raising the overall bar for data work.
• Collaborate with partner and platform teams across Roblox to ensure products are built with a community-first approach.
• Research and leverage industry-leading practices while making product impact.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience as a product-focused data systems engineer (preferably working with search, recommendation, advertising or personalization systems).
• Experience designing efficient logging schemas and optimizing data processing pipelines.
• Experience with real-time stream processing and batch processing (using technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, Druid).
• Familiarity with feature stores and other machine learning infrastructure.

Qualifications

• You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical solutions.
• Your technical expertise influences product direction.
• You nurture a culture of technical excellence.
• You are versatile and adaptable, comfortable with several languages and technologies.
• You are analytical and excited to investigate large, ambiguous problems, quantifying the problems and solutions.
• You are user-oriented, always starting with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users or internal engineers.
• You are team-oriented, lifting up your peers and finding ways to make the team stronger.

Skills

• Data systems engineering
• Real-time stream processing
• Batch processing
• Feature stores
• Machine learning infrastructure

Benefits

• Flexible structure
• Impactful work on key growth levers: retention, engagement, monetization, and creator success

Pay

The starting base pay for this position is $295,250—$354,040 USD. 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.

Schedule

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