Senior Software Engineer (Roblox Database)

Location: Roles based at the San Mateo, California headquarters are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday. The role is subject to US work-authorization restrictions, and future H-1B sponsorship may not be supported.

Salary: $243,290–$295,250 USD annual base pay, plus equity and benefits eligibility.

Company

Roblox builds a platform for creating and experiencing 3D immersive digital worlds used by tens of millions of people.

What you will do

• Design and implement database engine features covering indexing, storage formats, WAL, replication, sharding, and query planning.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema and tenant migrations across regions.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling to reduce tail latency.
• Build automation for testing, CI/CD, safe rollouts, observability, and autoscaling.
• Lead design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Mentor engineers, collaborate across Storage, Platform, and product teams, and contribute to open-source database ecosystems.

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience or relevant experience.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines.
• Expertise in database internals, including B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, and buffer management.
• Strong programming skills in C/C++, Go, or Rust, plus experience with consensus algorithms such as Raft or Paxos.
• Experience delivering high-QPS, low-latency services on Kubernetes or Nomad with comprehensive observability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous product requirements into technical roadmaps and influence cross-functional stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, or other open-source databases.
• Familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on database infrastructure operating at global scale.
• Opportunities to contribute to and influence open-source database communities.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and benefits.
• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations are provided during the recruiting process.