Senior Software Engineer (Data Infrastructure Compute)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States; office-based roles are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.

Salary: $243,290–$295,250 USD annual base pay.

Company

Roblox builds tools and platform infrastructure for immersive digital experiences created by a global community of developers and creators.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate Spark job submission services, APIs, scheduling integrations, and internal Spark libraries.
• Deliver interactive Spark through Spark Connect, including provisioning and management of EKS compute, workload isolation, resource limits, and cost controls.
• Automate EKS cluster fleet management, including blue-green rollouts that validate AMIs and Kubernetes versions with minimal disruption.
• Develop auto-tuning capabilities using Spark history and event logs to improve job performance and reduce compute cost.
• Operate and upgrade YuniKorn-based batch scheduling with queue design, quotas, tenant fairness, and version management.
• Define SLOs and observability, reduce incidents and operational toil, evaluate emerging technologies, and partner with data engineering, ML, analytics, and infrastructure teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems or infrastructure platforms.
• Hands-on experience running Apache Spark on Kubernetes, including executor and driver behavior, resource tuning, and troubleshooting failed or slow jobs; platform-building experience is required.
• Strong experience operating production Kubernetes clusters at scale, including upgrades, node lifecycle, autoscaling, and operators or controllers.
• Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Scala, or Clojure, with experience writing clean, well-tested, maintainable backend code.
• Experience with AWS, including EKS, EC2, IAM, and S3, or equivalent GCP services, plus infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience taking systems from design through production operation, including on-call, incident response, and observability.
• Ability to influence design decisions across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on cross-cutting changes.
• B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• For US-based roles, candidates must have US work authorization; certain US visa categories may not be supported.

Nice to have

• Python experience for tuning and analysis tooling.
• Experience with YuniKorn, Volcano, Kueue, or other Kubernetes batch schedulers.
• Experience with Spark Connect, Livy, Kyuubi, or other interactive and gateway layers for Spark.
• Experience with the Spark Operator, Karpenter, Helm, Terraform, or Argo.
• Experience building tooling with Spark event logs or metrics for tuning, cost attribution, or anomaly detection.
• Experience maintaining internal Spark builds or leading Spark version upgrades.
• Familiarity with native execution engines such as Comet, Gluten, or Velox, or with JVM performance tuning.
• Experience migrating workloads from YARN/Hadoop to Kubernetes.
• Open-source contributions in the data or Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Experience operating at consumer-internet scale with 100M+ users.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on large-scale systems supporting petabytes of daily data for analytics, machine learning, and product decisions.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Work includes cross-functional collaboration with data engineering, ML, analytics, and infrastructure teams.
• Roblox provides equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.