Director Engineering, Roblox
Economy ML
$399.4-458k
Plus equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office (San Mateo, CA)
Online gaming and entertainment platform
Posted today
Online gaming and entertainment platform
1001+ employees
Posted today
$399.4-458k
Plus equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office (San Mateo, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To connect a billion people with optimism and civility.
Role
Who you are
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant leadership experience managing engineering organizations
- Experience leading teams focused on machine learning, recommendation systems, search, ranking, or large-scale distributed systems
- Strong technical depth in ML systems, infrastructure, and modern machine learning architectures
- Experience with recommendation systems, marketplace/e-commerce ML, search, or ads systems
- Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, multi-modal models, or foundation model architectures
- Experience operating at large scale, including high-throughput inference systems, distributed training, or real-time personalization platforms
- Proven ability to drive cross-functional initiatives across multiple teams and organizations
- Strong product and business intuition with a track record of delivering measurable impact
- Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent and leaders
What the job involves
- The Economy ML team sits at the center of this mission. We build ML and AI systems that power personalization, search, pricing, recommendations, and virtual item intelligence across Roblox Economy surfaces, including Avatar Marketplace, Payments, Developer Monetization and Subscriptions
- As Roblox continues to invest deeply in AI and ML, this organization also plays a key role in advancing next-generation AI capabilities across the company through close partnership with Discovery, Foundation AI, Engine, Creator and product engineering teams. Our work spans both product impact and foundational ML innovation at Roblox scale
- We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead and scale Economy ML
- This leader will define the strategy, organization, and execution model for a fast-growing ML organization spanning recommendation systems, ML infrastructure, search, content intelligence, and Generative AI applications
- AI/ML is a top company priority, with strong executive support and long-term investment
- Massive real-world scale: Millions of users, creators, and economic interactions every day
- Unique technical challenges: Recommendations, pricing, fraud, search, and content understanding and generation across 3D assets, avatars, UGC, and virtual economies
- End-to-end ownership: Drive strategy and execution from modeling and infrastructure to production impact
- Frontier innovation: Apply modern ML and GenAI techniques to problems that do not exist anywhere else in the industry
- Define and lead the long-term strategy for Economy ML across core modeling, recommendations, search, pricing, content intelligence, and ML systems
- Build and scale a high-performing ML engineering organization, including managers and senior ICs
- Partner across teams to help advance shared AI technologies, infrastructure, and modeling capabilities that power experiences throughout Roblox
- Lead investments in next-generation ML systems, including large-scale recommendation models, foundation models, semantic retrieval, and Generative AI workflows
- Establish scalable ML development practices across experimentation, feature engineering, model serving, training infrastructure, and evaluation
- Drive adoption of modern ML architectures including transformers, multi-task learning, retrieval systems, and multi-modal modeling
- Partner with senior leadership to align technical investments with long-term business strategy and company priorities
- Mentor engineering leaders and cultivate a strong technical and execution culture across the organization
- Balance innovation and execution across both near-term product impact and long-term platform investments
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.
While the platform does face scrutiny over users safety (particularly given its young audience) the company's efforts to strengthen parental controls and open dialogue through initiatives like its new Parents Council signal a growing commitment to addressing these challenges. At the same time, its financial performance and creator-focused investments underscore a business in very strong health. With record payouts to developers, an expanding older player base, and a platform that increasingly rewards creative talent, Roblox's trajectory remains 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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