Principal Software Engineer (Data Infrastructure)

Location: San Mateo, California, United States. Roles based in the office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.

Salary: $295,250–$345,040 USD per year, plus equity eligibility and employee benefits.

Company

Roblox builds a 3D immersive digital platform where people explore, create, play, learn, and connect through experiences developed by a global community of creators.

What you will do

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems.
• Align infrastructure roadmaps with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams.
• Optimize distributed engine internals, query planning, state management, serialization, memory usage, throughput, and compute costs.
• Integrate AI, machine learning, and large language models into data discovery, metadata generation, and autonomous platform interfaces.
• Set organization-wide standards for code quality, architecture, reliability, incident analysis, and chaos engineering.
• Mentor staff, senior, and mid-level engineers while leading complex initiatives from initial design through production stability.

Requirements

• Equivalent of a bachelor's degree in computer science or sufficient relevant experience.
• 8+ years of experience building, designing, testing, and maintaining production-grade large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise with foundational data infrastructure such as Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Hive, Airflow, or advanced Data Catalog and metadata systems.
• Strong backend engineering skills in Java, Go, or Scala, including experience writing highly performant production code.
• Experience scaling and troubleshooting stateful and stateless multi-cluster infrastructure on Kubernetes within AWS or GCP.
• For US-based roles, candidates must have appropriate United States work authorization; future H-1B sponsorship may not be supported.

Nice to have

• Contributions to open-source projects in the data infrastructure ecosystem.
• Experience operating infrastructure for consumer internet platforms with more than 100 million users.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on infrastructure supporting petabytes of daily data and a platform serving more than 200 million daily active users.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Engineering culture emphasizes technical rigor, deep-dive post-incident analysis, proactive reliability work, and high ownership.
• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations are provided during the recruiting process.