Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

Location: San Mateo, California, United States; onsite Tuesday through Thursday, with optional office presence Monday and Friday

Salary: $293,800–$343,340 USD per year

Company

Roblox builds tools and infrastructure that enable developers and creators to produce shared 3D digital experiences.

What you will do

• Design and implement database engine features including indexing, storage formats, WAL, replication, sharding, and query-planner improvements.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema or tenant moves across global regions.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling to reduce tail latency.
• Lead design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives, and engineering best practices.
• Build automation for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with Storage, Platform, product teams, and 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.
• Expertise in database internals, including B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, and buffer management.
• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Go, or Rust, plus experience with Raft or Paxos and multi-region replication.
• Experience delivering high-QPS, low-latency services on Kubernetes or Nomad with comprehensive observability.
• For this office-based role, candidates must be eligible to work in the United States; certain U.S. visa categories may not be supported, and future H-1B sponsorship may not be available.

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

• Full-time employment with eligibility for equity compensation and employee benefits.
• Collaboration across Storage, Platform, and product teams.
• Opportunities to contribute to and influence the PostgreSQL, RocksDB, and related open-source ecosystems.
• Equal employment opportunities and reasonable accommodations during the recruiting process.