Senior Engineering Manager, Communications (Real-Time Messaging)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States; office attendance is required Tuesday through Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.

Salary: $345,040–$399,420 USD annual base pay, plus potential equity and benefits.

Company

Roblox builds a platform and tools for creating and experiencing immersive 3D digital worlds.

What you will do

• Lead, grow, and develop the engineering team responsible for Roblox’s in-game text chat platform.
• Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging.
• Design and evolve messaging systems delivering billions of messages per day with low latency across platforms.
• Partner with product and design to build expressive, engaging, and user-focused communication features.
• Collaborate with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to make messaging safe and civil for a young global audience.
• Establish engineering practices for quality, observability, on-call health, reliability, and operational excellence.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams.
• Experience building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale, preferably messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to balance user experience, technical complexity, and delivery speed.
• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, including reliability, latency, and high-throughput production services.
• Ability to attract, develop, and retain engineers and build high-performing teams.
• Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with comfort driving alignment in ambiguous, high-scale environments.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a product-focused environment shaping communication experiences for a large global community.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Reasonable accommodations are available during the recruiting process for qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs.
• For US-based roles, future H-1B sponsorship may not be supported, and certain US visa categories may not be eligible.