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Salary: USD 243,290 - 295,250 / annual
Roblox operates a massive platform serving 200M+ daily active users, processing petabytes of data daily. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Real-time Analytics Platform team, you will design, build, and scale the core OLAP infrastructure powering sub-second analytical queries across the platform.
You will own and operate StarRocks and Apache Druid, driving high-throughput streaming ingestion and low-latency MPP (massively parallel processing) query execution. This role combines high ownership with deep technical complexity, requiring you to push the boundaries of MPP engine performance, streaming ingestion pipelines, and cluster scalability.
Key responsibilities include:
- Taking end-to-end ownership of the architecture, operational health, and scalability of high-throughput OLAP engines (StarRocks and Apache Druid)
- Optimizing query engine performance by diving deep into engine internals, cost-based optimization, query planning, vectorized execution, memory optimization, and serialization efficiency to maintain sub-second latency under heavy concurrent load
- Architecting and building real-time data ingestion pipelines leveraging Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and native engine load mechanisms
- Partnering with infrastructure, data science, and product engineering teams to guide OLAP data modeling best practices, optimizing partitioning, bucketing, sort keys, and materialized views
- Leading cluster provisioning, lifecycle management, operations, and capacity planning using Kubernetes and Terraform across cloud environments
- Integrating AI/ML and LLM-driven capabilities within query platforms to enable automated self-serve mechanisms and intelligent data discovery
You will influence technical direction across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on complex cross-cutting initiatives.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years of experience building, designing, testing, and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems
- Deep hands-on engineering or operational experience with StarRocks or adjacent OLAP engines (Apache Druid, ClickHouse, Apache Doris, Apache Pinot, or Trino/Presto)
- Proven track record implementing high-volume streaming ingestion using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Routine Load/Broker Load, or Debezium/CDC pipelines
- Expertise in OLAP schema design (partitioning, bucketing, sort keys, indexing) and tuning cost-based SQL query engines for massive scale
- Robust proficiency in Java, Go, C++, or Scala with a track record of writing clean, highly performant distributed backend code
- Experience operating, troubleshooting, and provisioning data infrastructure at scale using Kubernetes and Terraform on AWS or GCP
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on complex initiatives
- B.S. equivalent in Computer Science or sufficient equivalent experience
- Bonus: Core contributions to open-source OLAP databases; experience operating real-time analytical platforms at consumer-internet scale (100M+ active users)
