Principal Software Engineer, Roblox
Roblox Database
$293.8-343.3k
+ Equity
More information about location
Office located in San Mateo, CA
Online gaming & entertainment platform
Be an early applicant
Online gaming & entertainment platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$293.8-343.3k
+ Equity
More information about location
Office located in San Mateo, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To connect a billion people with optimism and civility.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
- Deep experience with building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB)
- Deep expertise in database internals—B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management—and strong skills in C/C++, GO or Rust
- Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver strong consistency and high availability
- Proven success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability
- Ability to turn ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders
- Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making that raises the reliability and efficiency bar
- Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages
What the job involves
- Roblox’s database team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload at Roblox
- As a principal engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch critical database capabilities that keep our services fast, reliable and efficient at global scale
- You will report to the Technical Director for Storage
- Design and implement new engine features—indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements—that push latency, throughput, and availability boundaries
- Evolve the control plane to deliver 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; drive systematic tail-latency reductions
- Establish engineering best practices by leading design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives
- Automate everything: develop frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling so that the platform operates hands-off at scale
- Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering deep database craftsmanship and disseminating knowledge across Storage, Platform, and product teams
- Engage with the open-source community—upstreaming patches, presenting learnings, and influencing the future of Postgres, RocksDB and related ecosystems
Our take
Online gaming may be a well-established space, but Roblox has distinguished itself as a leader by empowering its community to build, share, and profit from their own creations - turning game development into an accessible, rewarding ecosystem for millions of users.
In addition to standard games, the platform offers virtual worlds and other experiences to explore and interact with. Its platform provides an online ecosystem for millions to create, socialize, chat, and explore immersive experiences with friends. In fact, in the US its used by two-thirds of children aged 9 to 12.
The platform has faced scrutiny over user safety, but responded by strengthen parental controls and launching initiatives like its "Parents Council". This move to address these issues, atop its strong financial performance and record payouts to developers, showcase Roblox's trajectory as one of innovation and impressive growth.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jan 2021
$520m
SERIES H
Feb 2020
$150m
SERIES G
Total funding: $922.8m
Company HQ
South San Mateo, San Mateo, CA
Leadership
David Baszucki
(Founder & CEO)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford before founding Knowledge Revolution in 1990, where they spent 9 years as CEO. They worked as VP of MSC.Software for 2 years, and started Roblox in 2005.
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