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Salary: USD 345,040 - 399,420 / annual
Roblox is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of its next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that powers all online data workloads at global scale. You will report to the Technical Director for Storage and shape critical database capabilities that keep services fast, reliable, and efficient.
Key responsibilities include:
• Design and implement advanced engine features—indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements—to 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 testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling frameworks so 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.
Roblox's database team develops the infrastructure underpinning tens of millions of daily users exploring, creating, and connecting in 3D immersive experiences. This is a high-impact role shaping the future of a platform at massive scale.
Office presence: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday onsite; Monday and Friday optional.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 12+ years of software engineering experience or relevant field
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB)
• Deep expertise in database internals: B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management
• Strong programming skills in C/C++, Go, or Rust
• Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models delivering 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 translate ambiguous product requirements into clear technical roadmaps and influence cross-functional stakeholders
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making
• Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages
