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Salary: USD 295,250 - 345,050 / annual
Roblox is seeking a Principal Machine Learning Platform Engineer to lead the design and development of ML Platform infrastructure that powers hundreds of use cases and billions of inferences daily across Discovery, Safety, Economy, and Creation. This role blends product thinking, developer experience, backend engineering, and infrastructure at scale.
You will own the ML Platform as a product end-to-end: defining requirements, writing RFDs, and shipping APIs, SDKs, CLIs, and UIs that make machine learning adoption seamless across Roblox. You'll bootstrap and maintain core ML Platform components including the Serving Layer, Model Registry, Pipeline Orchestrator, and Training/Inference control planes. Your focus is on treating platform as a product—turning complex ML/AI infrastructure into clear, durable abstractions that internal developers love.
Key responsibilities include setting technical strategy and overseeing development of high-scale, reliable infrastructure systems with clear SLOs for latency, availability, and cost. You'll design great developer experiences through paved-road templates, golden paths, opinionated defaults, and clear documentation to reduce time-to-first-production. You'll instrument the platform to measure adoption, friction, reliability, and cost, using data to prioritize roadmap and validate outcomes.
You'll partner across organizations (ML Engineering, Data Science, Infra/SRE, Security, Finance) to optimize performance, safety, and spend, especially for GPU-intensive training and high-QPS inference. You'll propose and implement new platform tooling to improve time to production for ML engineers across the full ML lifecycle, stay abreast of industry trends, mentor junior and senior engineers, lead design reviews, and drive cross-team architectural decisions.
The role is hybrid, based in San Mateo with onsite presence Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (optional Monday and Friday).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of professional experience with substantial system design expertise
- Proficiency in API design and developer experience (gRPC/REST APIs, SDKs, CLIs, UIs)
- Strong hands-on coding ability with obsession over shipping product and user feedback
- Experience with end-to-end ML model lifecycle (model serving, training, model CI/CD, GPU resource management)
- Passion for infrastructure-as-code and automating manual processes
- Ability to support ML engineers, understand their needs, and translate them into clean platform abstractions
- Excellent written and verbal communication across varying technical levels
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or similar technical field
