Distinguished Engineer/Senior Principal Engineer, Roblox
Technical Director, Roblox AI Assistant
$372.9-449k
+ Equity
More information about location
3-5 days a week in office (San Mateo, CA)
Online gaming and entertainment platform
Job no longer available
Online gaming and entertainment platform
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$372.9-449k
+ Equity
More information about location
3-5 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
- We need someone who lives and breathes improving LLM output quality, specifically for pushing performance in challenging, specialized domains
- You are obsessed with the post-training loop:
- You have deep, hands-on experience and intuition for techniques like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), data curation/mixology, and building robust evaluation suites
- You understand the subtle interplay between data quality, model scale, and tuning strategies
- You have competed and won at the highest levels:
- You have a proven track record of taking state-of-the-art foundation models and significantly improving their capabilities on specific, difficult tasks – ideally code generation, but deep expertise demonstrated in any complex domain (e.g. , mathematics, reasoning, native multimodal output, complex instruction following) is highly relevant
- You've likely led teams of 25+ engineers pushing benchmark performance at leading AI labs or internal efforts within major tech companies
- You are deeply technical and hands-on: While you will lead technical direction, you aren't afraid to dive into the weeds to diagnose tricky model behavior, analyze failure modes, or prototype new data processing techniques
- You understand the mechanics, not just the concepts
- You think rigorously about data: You appreciate that progress is often gated by data quality and effective curation
- You have experience designing and scaling data annotation efforts and developing signals to identify high-quality data for specialized domains
- Qualifications: A strong academic background (MS/PhD preferred) in CS, ML, or a related quantitative field
- Proven track record with 15+ years of experience including deep expertise in frontier LLM post-training
- Fluent in ML frameworks (like PyTorch) and data processing tools (like PySpark)
What the job involves
- As a member of the Roblox Studio team, you’ll be working on the most popular tool for game development in the world on a platform with over 80M daily active users
- Our Studio team is seeking an exceptional Director-level technical engineering lead to push the boundaries of AI-assisted game development
- Foundation models are powerful generalists, but unlocking their true potential requires deep specialization
- At Roblox, we're building an AI Assistant to fundamentally change how millions of creators build immersive experiences
- A critical component is generating high-quality, context-aware Lua code
- This isn't about simple boilerplate; it's about understanding user intent, the nuances of the Roblox API, and the structure of complex game logic
- Making a large language model genuinely useful – truly assistive – for programming in a specific, massive ecosystem like Roblox is a frontier challenge in applied AI
- As a Technical Director (IC role) for Roblox Assistant, you’ll own the overall technical vision for machine learning initiatives toward a future where the highest quality games can be created dramatically faster than is possible today and the strategy and execution for specializing our LLMs for code generation via post-training
- Deep Specialization: How do we effectively adapt frontier LLMs to master the intricacies of Lua within the Roblox engine?
- Data is King (and Hard): We have vast amounts of code, but transforming it into high-signal training data for SFT, preference tuning (RLHF, DPO, etc.), and robust evaluation is a complex machine learning and engineering challenge. We need to pioneer sophisticated quality signals and data mixing strategies
- Beyond Instruction Following: Moving past simple prompt-response towards genuine reasoning and problem-solving for complex coding tasks. How do we improve the model's ability to handle ambiguity, plan multi-step and multi-file code generation, and debug?
- Rigorous Evaluation: Defining and implementing meaningful evaluations that capture true coding utility, beyond surface-level metrics
- Define and drive the technical roadmap for improving Roblox Assistant's code generation and reasoning capabilities through advanced LLM post-training
- Lead the design and execution of experiments in fine-tuning, preference alignment, and data strategy
- Establish rigorous evaluation methodologies to measure true progress in coding assistance
- Work closely with ML engineers, providing technical guidance and mentorship focused specifically on model improvement techniques
- Stay at the absolute forefront of LLM research and apply relevant advancements to our specific challenges
- Contribute to the core intellectual challenges of making AI a powerful, reliable tool for millions of software creators
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.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 108 more jobs at Roblox