Principal Software Engineer - Object Store

Location: San Mateo, California, United States; hybrid office schedule with onsite work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and optional presence Monday and Friday

Salary: $295,250–$345,040 USD annual base pay

Company

Roblox builds tools and platforms for creating and operating large-scale 3D digital experiences.

What you will do

• Design and build a multi-tenant, S3-compatible object storage platform for assets, media, analytics, backups, and machine learning datasets.
• Set the long-term technical strategy, make build-versus-buy decisions, and lead migration from cloud object storage.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant migrations.
• Operate bare-metal storage fleets, including cluster lifecycle management, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, and capacity planning.
• Optimize critical data paths, tail latency, cost per byte, observability, testing, CI/CD, and rollout safety.
• Establish engineering practices, mentor engineers, and collaborate with security, analytics, and product teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a related field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage systems at petabyte scale or beyond.
• Production experience with object storage, data placement, rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and large-scale upgrades.
• Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust, with a deep understanding of durability, replication, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, and blast-radius containment.
• Experience shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal or on-premises fleets with strong observability.
• For US-based roles, candidates may need applicable United States work authorization; future H-1B sponsorship may not be supported.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source storage projects.
• Experience with S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads from public-cloud object storage.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with equity compensation eligibility and employee benefits.
• Work on infrastructure operated end to end on bare metal in company data centers.
• Engineering practices include design reviews, benchmarking, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Focus on safer, more reliable shared digital experiences and large-scale technical challenges.