Distinguished Engineer (Machine Learning)

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

Salary: $397,460–$455,720 USD annual base pay, plus potential equity and benefits.

Company

Roblox builds tools and platforms for a global community to create and experience immersive 3D digital environments and a virtual economy.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for ML systems supporting personalization, ranking, generative modeling, pricing, search, and other economy experiences.
• Build infrastructure for training, serving, and evaluating traditional ML and Generative AI models, including retrieval systems, transformers, and LLM workflows.
• Partner with GenAI teams on multimodal embeddings, avatar generation, and retrieval-augmented generation for economic products.
• Optimize low-latency serving, GPU training efficiency, cost-aware inference, ML pipelines, feature stores, and experimentation platforms.
• Own the architecture of foundational ML systems and ensure robustness, observability, scalability, and reliability at massive scale.
• Lead technical initiatives, collaborate with engineering and product partners, mentor senior engineers, and help define the economy intelligence stack.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or ML infrastructure, focused on large-scale ML systems.
• Deep expertise in recommendation systems, ranking infrastructure, or real-time personalization engines.
• Hands-on experience with Generative AI, including transformer-based models, LLMs, embeddings, or RAG pipelines.
• Experience with distributed training, model deployment, GPU-accelerated workflows, data pipelines, feature stores, and inference optimization.
• Proven ability to lead large technical initiatives and mentor senior engineers, with a systems-first focus on scale, cost, performance, and reliability.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• AI and ML are strategic company priorities with long-term investment.
• Work on systems powering millions of daily economic interactions across ranking, pricing, fraud, search, and personalization.
• Full-system ownership spanning data ingestion, GPU training, live inference, and experimentation.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations are provided during the recruiting process.

Hiring process

• Reasonable accommodations are available to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs.
• For US-based roles, certain US visa categories may not be supported, and future H-1B sponsorship may be unavailable.