Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

Company

Roblox builds tools and platform infrastructure for 3D immersive digital experiences created by its global developer and creator community.

What you will do

• Design and implement database engine features including indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements.
• Evolve the control plane to support elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema and tenant moves across global regions.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths with kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling to reduce tail latency.
• Lead design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives, and engineering best-practice initiatives.
• Build automation for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers, collaborate across Storage, Platform, and product teams, and contribute to the open-source database community.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines such as PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, or AlloyDB.
• Strong knowledge of database internals, including B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, and buffer management.
• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Go, or Rust.
• Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms such as Raft or Paxos and multi-region replication models supporting strong consistency and high availability.
• Experience delivering high-QPS, low-latency services on Kubernetes or Nomad with comprehensive observability, plus the ability to create technical roadmaps and influence stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, or other open-source databases.
• Experience with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on database infrastructure supporting global-scale online workloads.
• Collaborate with Storage, Platform, and product engineering teams.
• Full-time employees are eligible for equity compensation and company benefits.
• Office-based roles are onsite Tuesday through Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday unless otherwise noted.
• Roblox provides reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.