Principal Software Engineer (GenAI Platform)

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

Salary: $328,610–$362,280 USD base pay.

Company

Roblox provides tools and platforms for developers and creators to build 3D immersive digital experiences.

What you will do

• Define the multi-year technical vision and architecture for machine learning, generative AI, and agentic experience platforms across Roblox.
• Lead high-impact platform problems involving multi-provider inference resiliency and information retrieval infrastructure for agentic systems.
• Establish self-service standards, paved paths, guardrails, usage attribution, metering, spend controls, and ticket-free onboarding for multi-tenant platforms.
• Make foundational trade-offs across quality, latency, reliability, cost, and responsible data use, with instrumentation and observability built into the architecture.
• Own SLOs, capacity planning, on-call, incident response, graceful degradation, and recovery for the platform at scale.
• Set technical direction, build alignment across engineering and leadership, and mentor engineers through design and code reviews.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale production software, distributed systems, cloud services, or related infrastructure.
• A sustained track record of designing and owning foundational systems or platforms with organization-wide or company-wide impact.
• Deep expertise in one or more of machine learning, generative AI, distributed systems, data infrastructure, or developer platforms, with breadth across these areas.
• Expert proficiency in one or more of Go, Python, or Rust.
• Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and completing large cross-organizational initiatives.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills for aligning engineers, product, and leadership around technical strategy.
• An undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLM gateways, inference serving, or model-routing layers, including multi-provider failover, rate limiting, and token or cost accounting at scale.
• Hands-on experience with vector databases, similarity search, knowledge graphs, RAG, or agentic systems.
• Experience with retrieval pipelines, agent memory, context management, or evaluation of non-deterministic systems.
• Experience designing multi-tenant platforms with usage attribution, metering, spend controls, and self-service onboarding.
• Background in GPU infrastructure or ML inference efficiency, including batching, quantization, accelerator utilization, or cost optimization.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and benefits.
• Work in a cross-functional Foundation AI organization partnering with engineering, product, research, data, infrastructure, safety, creator, engine, discovery, and economy teams.
• Roblox provides equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.
• For US-based roles, certain US visa categories may not be supported and future H-1B sponsorship may be unavailable.