Senior Engineering Manager, Communications

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences—all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and we’re looking for amazing talent to help us get there.

About the role

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Communications, you'll lead the team responsible for in-game text chat—one of the most-used surfaces on Roblox and a cornerstone of how our community connects. Every day, this system carries billions of messages across hundreds of millions of users, in real time, across 2D and 3D spaces, on every device we support. You'll own the roadmap and the engineering org behind it: building rich, immersive, and engaging communication experiences that let people and creators express themselves safely and seamlessly—better than in real life. This is a role for a leader who thinks like a product builder as much as an engineer. You'll balance the demands of massive scale and rock-solid reliability with a relentless focus on the user experience, shipping features that make conversation on Roblox feel effortless, expressive, and safe.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers building the in-game text chat platform, setting a high bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and career growth.
• Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging, balancing new product capabilities against scale, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Drive the architecture and evolution of messaging systems that reliably deliver billions of messages per day at low latency to a global, cross-platform audience.
• Partner with product and design to shape a compelling communication experience—treating chat as a product, not just infrastructure—and translate ambiguous goals into concrete plans and shipped features.
• Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to ensure every messaging experience is safe and civil by design for a young, global user base.
• Establish strong engineering practices around quality, observability, on-call health, and operational excellence for systems that must always be available.
• Communicate clearly and influence across the organization—with peers, leadership, and cross-functional partners—to align teams behind a shared direction.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams.
• A track record of building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale—ideally messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems.
• Strong product intuition: you make thoughtful tradeoffs between user experience, technical complexity, and speed, and you care about what you ship, not just how it's built.
• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong grasp of reliability, latency, and the realities of running high-throughput services in production.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers, and to build healthy, high-performing teams.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a history of driving alignment across product, design, and engineering.
• A bias toward action and a comfort with ambiguity, especially at high scale.

Nice to have

• Experience with real-time messaging protocols, presence systems, or high-fanout delivery infrastructure.
• Background in trust & safety, content moderation, or safety-critical systems.
• Experience building communication or social features for large, global, or youth audiences.
• Familiarity with cross-platform (mobile, console, desktop) product development.

Pay

For roles based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA, the starting base pay range is $345,040—$399,420 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. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and benefits.

Schedule

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