Principal Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

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

Base salary: $345,040–$399,420 USD per year

Company

Roblox provides a platform and cloud services for creating, publishing, and operating 3D interactive experiences.

What you will do

• Lead the design and development of cloud services and data storage products for Roblox creators.
• Build infrastructure, serving layers, clients, and web APIs for scalable storage systems.
• Expand observability through metrics collection, data pipelines, analytics, visualizations, and dashboards.
• Increase capabilities and onboard customers to the Roblox Extended Services platform, including compute and generative AI services.
• Support creators, investigate product gaps and bugs, and respond to production alerts and outages.
• Mentor engineers and lead collaboration with product, UX, developer relations, documentation, support, and engineering teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software development experience with public clouds, microservices, and distributed systems.
• 3+ years building and maintaining data storage systems, plus 10+ years delivering robust production-grade code.
• 6+ years programming in C# and/or C++.
• 6+ years working on agile, high-impact software teams.
• 4+ years leading junior engineers and new graduates on complex software projects.
• For US-based roles, eligibility may be limited for certain US visa categories and future H-1B sponsorship may not be supported.

Nice to have

• Experience with big data pipelines or batch processing systems such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Flink, Spark, or Flume.
• Experience programming computer games, particularly in Lua or Luau.
• Knowledge of data science, analytics, machine learning, or AI.
• Experience building graphical user interfaces, dashboards, or web application front ends.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on mission-critical services focused on high availability and data durability.
• Collaborate across engineering, product, UX, project management, developer relations, documentation, and customer support.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Participate in on-call support for data products.
• Develop technical leadership through mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and company-wide initiatives.