Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database
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. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
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. You will report to the Technical Director for Storage.
You will:
- 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.
- Automate everything: develop frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling so that 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.
You have:
- 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.
- Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making that raises the reliability and efficiency bar.
- Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. 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. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in our San Mateo, CA Headquarters are in-office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional in-office on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations for all candidates during the interview process.
Average salary estimate
If an employer mentions a salary or salary range on their job, we display it as an "Employer Estimate". If a job has no salary data, Rise displays an estimate if available.
Lead the innovative product strategy for communication tools at Roblox, shaping how users interact and connect in immersive digital environments.
Roblox is looking for a Senior Network Operations Engineer to ensure the reliability and scalability of its global network through hands-on operations and cross-team collaboration.
Contribute to secure, scalable .NET Core applications as a Mid-Level Full Stack Developer supporting crucial military cemetery services at Integral Federal.
Persona is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning, to innovate and optimize ML models for their identity verification platform serving leading companies worldwide.
Carry is hiring a Senior Backend Python Engineer to build and scale core financial systems in their Brooklyn office.
Samsara is seeking a technical leader Staff Software Engineer to drive architectural innovation and build scalable platform systems for their connected operations cloud.
Software Engineer role at Thumbtack to build and enhance AI-driven product features transforming home service user interactions.
Experienced Senior Software Engineer needed to develop large-scale data infrastructure and pipelines for high-performance GPU clusters at IntelliPro.
ANA seeks a skilled Software Engineer to develop embedded and cloud software solutions onsite in Henderson, NV, supporting advanced hybrid energy systems and power products.
BlackRock seeks a Lead Engineer, Vice President in Atlanta to lead the design and development of scalable enterprise client business software.
Experienced Senior Payment Software Engineer needed to drive the development of secure, scalable payment systems at Gravie, innovating healthcare financial operations.
Clēnera is hiring a Backend Software Engineer to lead small projects and develop high-quality software solutions supporting its renewable energy growth.
Experienced Senior Java Backend Developer role at Citi focusing on modern application architecture and secure, scalable systems development.
An expert Front End engineer role at Paperless Post focused on building scalable user-facing features and creative tools for a large audience.
Parsons is hiring a Senior Kafka Developer to craft data streaming solutions and collaborate with cross-functional teams at their Quantico, VA facility.
Roblox's mission is connect a billion people with optimism and civility. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together.
31 jobs
🔮
Hi, I'm Risa! Your AI Career Copilot
you, just ask me below!
