Roblox
Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database
San Mateo, CA, United States · Principal · Full-time
H1B sponsorship available$294k-$343kDetected 12 hours ago
GoRustC++AlgorithmsPostgreSQLMySQLKubernetesCI/CDPublic Speaking
About the role
- Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device.
- You will report to the Technical Director for Storage.
- For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement new engine features -indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements-that 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.
- For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
- Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences- all created by our global community of developers and creators.
- At Roblox, we're building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life.
- A career at Roblox means you'll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
- Roblox's database team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload at Roblox.
- As a principal engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch critical database capabilities that keep our services fast, reliable and efficient at global scale.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
- Deep experience with building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).
- Deep expertise in database internals -B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management-and strong skills in C/C++, GO or Rust.
- Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver 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 turn ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
Nice to have
- upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases
- familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.
Skills
- Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering deep database craftsmanship and disseminating knowledge across Storage, Platform, and product teams.
Compensation
- $293,800 - $343,340 USD
- Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range.
- This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.
Benefits
- All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Visa & Work Authorization
- For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
This listing is sourced directly from Roblox's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.