Principal Software Engineer, Data Tooling

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

Salary: $295,250–$345,040 USD annual base pay. Full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and benefits.

Company

Roblox builds a platform and tools for developers and creators to create 3D immersive digital experiences used by a global community.

What you will do

• Lead, coach, hire, and develop a team of engineers while establishing clear expectations and engineering standards.
• Own the roadmap for shared data tooling covering data quality, lineage, metadata, ownership, discoverability, observability, lifecycle management, optimization, and self-service.
• Set technical direction for workflows, dashboards, alerts, recommendations, and automated remediation based on data and operational signals.
• Improve the experience of discovering, validating, operating, and governing data products.
• Reduce operational toil, improve data quality and freshness, shorten incident resolution time, optimize compute and storage costs, and retire low-value data assets responsibly.
• Align teams on priorities, tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, measurable outcomes, and a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Experience managing, mentoring, or technically leading engineers, with a demonstrated commitment to people development and high-performing teams.
• Experience with data catalogs, lineage systems, data-quality frameworks, observability platforms, or metadata services.
• Familiarity with agentic or AI-assisted workflows for data discovery, analysis, or platform operations.
• Experience building or operating shared platforms and frameworks used by multiple teams, rather than only one-off datasets or pipelines.
• Experience partnering with Data Science, experimentation, ML, product, or infrastructure teams to turn ambiguous requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Strong product thinking, including identifying high-leverage customer problems, prioritizing competing requests, driving adoption, and measuring platform impact.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including explaining technical concepts and tradeoffs to engineering and non-technical stakeholders.
• For US-based roles, candidates may need to hold eligible United States work authorization; certain U.S. visa categories may not be supported, and future H-1B sponsorship may not be available.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on tools and platforms supporting Data Engineering, Data Science, Experimentation, Machine Learning, and product teams.
• Full-time employment with equity compensation and employee benefits.
• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable recruiting accommodations for qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs.