Principal Software Engineer - Data Access

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 Storage team powers the data foundation behind every experience on the platform. As a Principal Software Engineer for Data Access, you will architect and build the next‑generation managed OLTP data access layer — engineered for extreme scale, global availability, and uncompromising security. You will design core infrastructure capable of serving hundreds of millions of queries per second while ensuring reliable, low‑latency access to data worldwide.

The challenges are large‑scale, highly technical, and business‑critical: you will shape foundational storage systems, evolve platform‑wide scalability and reliability, and provide strong technical leadership that raises engineering quality across teams. This work requires deep innovation, clear architectural vision, and a passion for distributed systems — redefining how Roblox engineers build, access, and trust data at scale.

You Will

• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Security teams to define long‑term strategy and technical requirements for the Data Access platform.
• Lead the architecture, implementation, and operation of our storage Infra‑as‑a‑Service offerings, setting the engineering bar for scalability, reliability, and system hardening across teams.
• Improve and scale our large distributed 24x7 services and deliver features with urgency, cost efficiency, zero down time, and high reliability.
• Design and build frameworks or tools to automate development, testing, deployment, management, and monitoring of mission critical services.
• Collaborate with partner teams, producing project work plans, measurable metrics, delivery milestones, rollout plans, oncall alerts, and runbooks while leveraging existing technology stack.
• Give a high level of attention to creating high quality and reusable code, keeping development continuous without compromising site reliability.
• Improve SLAs across the platform and reduce end‑to‑end rollout time for critical storage and data-access features.
  
  

You Have

• Strong experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems handling millions of real-time requests per second.
• Deep data management knowledge in one or more of the following technologies: RDBMS (CockroachDB, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, RDB), Caching (Redis), Kafka, KV store (DynamoDB, Cassandra).
• Strong experience building deployment pipelines on top of container orchestrators like Kubernetes or Nomad and service discovery systems like Consul.
• Strong experience with programming languages like Rust, Go, Java, or C .
• Strong scripting and test automation abilities.
• Experience with telemetry stacks, like Grafana, Prometheus, AlertManager, and Kibana.
• BS degree (or equivalent professional experience) in Computer Science, with at least 7 years of hands-on experience.
  
  

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

$289,460—$338,270 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.