[2025] Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Discovery - PhD New Grad

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.

The Discovery team at Roblox plays a critical role in connecting our community to the experiences, content, and creators they love. As the Discovery Core Product team, we work closely with infrastructure teams to power major search and discovery surfaces such as the homepage, experience details page, charts, and search.

Our mission is to drive Roblox’s top-line growth by improving user engagement, retention, and ecosystem diversity. Over the next few years, we aim to completely redesign Roblox’s primary search and discovery surfaces to elevate the user experience. As part of the Discovery Core Product team—a blend of product and applied research expertise—this role involves tackling some of the most challenging problems in search, discovery, and content understanding.

You Will:

• Develop cutting-edge machine learning models for recommendation systems, search systems, image/video understanding, and text understanding.
• Apply advanced techniques in LLMs and multimodal learning to improve content and user understanding.
• Create end-to-end solutions to enhance search and discovery across key surfaces like the homepage, search, and experience details page.
• Ensure the scalability, reliability, and extensibility of our machine learning systems.

You Have:

• Possess or pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a similar technical degree.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Go, Python, C++, or C#
• Expertise in one or more of the following areas: recommendation systems, information retrieval, text/image/video understanding, or GenAI/foundation models.
• Strong background in advanced techniques such as LLMs, multimodal learning, and other state-of-the-art machine learning methods.
• Experience building and working on end-to-end ML pipelines, including data processing, modeling, and production deployment.
• Published and presented peer-reviewed articles in top-tier venues, such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, KDD, WWW and RecSys.

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$218,540—$218,540 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.