Principal Software Engineer (Backend), Communication

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 that 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 looking for amazing talent to help us get there. 

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.

As a Principal Software Engineer, Communication, you’ll define service architecture that empowers safe and flawless ways for people to express themselves in different modalities better than in real life with Voice, Camera, and Text, at scale.

You will work with various teams (Game Engine, Safety, ML platform) and products including backend services working at high scale, data pipelines, ML models, and tools to ensure safe and civil multimodal communication experiences.

If you are an expert developer with a deep understanding of large scale systems and enjoy shaping engineering vision, you’ll be right at home within our highly-skilled and rapidly growing team.

You Will:

• Build the next gen software & systems to support Roblox's substantial user growth, while supporting the existing systems that can already handle millions of concurrent users. This may involve building backend services working at high scale, ML models, or tools to support our operation teams.
• Shape how the next generation of internet users interacts safely in the metaverse
• Define and build platform features to support product teams across the company in ensuring safety in every aspect of real time communication at Roblox.
• Collaborate with product and design to push the boundary of what is possible.
• Use the best programming practices, optimizing code to be performant
• Help recruit future talent for the team

You Have:

• Fluency in backend software development
• Proficiency in Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL or other database technology at scale
• 8+ years proven experience building and supporting highly available and large-scale distributed fault tolerant services in production environments
• Experience with low-level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale
• Experience in networking protocols (HTTP, UDP, GRPC, Web Sockets)

You Are:

• Responsible: you build systems that work and keep on working optimally. You are thorough in your designs, meticulous in handling potential failure cases, and diligent in automated testing.
• Analytical: Excited to investigate large, ambiguous problems, and quantify the problems and the solutions.
• Versatile: you’re a generalist and you have mastered one or more object oriented languages and technologies already; you can easily adapt to any situation when the need emerges and come up with the right solution.
• Creative: You take a creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems and driving new tools/functionality for our end users and game developers
• Team-oriented: You are able to work well as part of a team and know how to collaborate with all participants to develop the best solutions. Able to write clear design specs, mentor junior engineers, and guide projects from beginning to end
• Data-driven: focused on quality metrics and monitoring
• Experienced with a Bachelor's degree (or equivalent professional experience) in Computer Science or related engineering field with at least 8 years of hands-on experience

For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: 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. 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 for benefits.

Annual Salary Range$315,850—$383,910 USD

Roles that are based in our San Mateo, CA Headquarters are in-office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional in-office on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).

You’ll Love: 

• Industry-leading compensation package
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• A rewarding 401k program
• Flexible vacation policy (varies by exemption status)
• Roflex - Flexible and supportive work policy 
• Roblox Admin badge for your avatar
• At Roblox HQ: 
• Free catered lunches five times a week and several fully stocked kitchens with unlimited snacks
• Onsite fitness center and fitness program credit
• Annual CalTrain Go Pass

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. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations for all candidates during the interview process.