Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 12+ 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
• (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver strong consistency and high availability.
• high-QPS, low-latency services
• Ability to turn ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for
• that raises the reliability and efficiency bar.

You have

consensus algorithms

• Proven success shipping on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability.
• 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.

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

Annual Salary Range

$345,040

$399,420 USD

Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence 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 to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.

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.