Principal Cloud & Kubernetes Engineer - Compute

As a Principal Software Engineer in the Compute organization, you will serve as the technical lead for Roblox's global Kubernetes ecosystem. You will set the long-term architectural strategy for a platform that manages thousands of nodes across both on-premises data centers and public cloud fleets supporting millions of concurrent requests. In this high-impact position, you will dive into Kubernetes internals—including custom controllers, operators, API server architecture, container networking, and etcd—to transform compute infrastructure into a secure, self-healing, high-performance, and invisible foundation for thousands of internal engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Strategy & Leadership: Define and own the 10-year architectural roadmap for Roblox's global Kubernetes ecosystem across multi-tenant on-prem and public cloud infrastructure.
• Kubernetes Internals & Control Plane: Engineer solutions directly within Kubernetes control plane components—building custom controllers, custom resource definitions (CRDs), operators, and optimizing etcd and API server throughput for high-concurrency workloads.
• Internal Developer Experience: Design intuitive, developer-centric abstraction layers and developer tooling that simplify how internal software engineering pods consume compute capabilities.
• Multi-Tenant Security Architecture: Design secure isolation, multi-tenancy frameworks, zero-trust container security, and identity solutions allowing diverse internal workloads to safely coexist across thousands of nodes.
• Operational Resilience & Automation: Architect advanced self-healing orchestration, automated remediation pipelines, and observability stacks to minimize Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and guarantee high availability.
• Cross-Functional Alignment & Mentorship: Partner with executive engineering leaders to balance rapid feature velocity against platform stability, while actively mentoring senior and staff-level engineers through architectural reviews.

Requirements

Distributed Systems & Kubernetes Depth

• Experience Track: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building, architecting, and operating large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or internal developer platforms.
• Deep Kubernetes Expertise: Demonstrated mastery of Kubernetes internals with a track record of modifying, extending, or contributing upstream to the Kubernetes ecosystem (custom controllers, custom operators, scheduler plugins).
• Massive Production Scale: Proven history of operating mission-critical infrastructure platforms that scale across thousands of physical/virtual nodes or process high-throughput, low-latency microservices.
• Cloud-Native Security & Networking: Deep understanding of modern cloud-native security practices, container networking interfaces (CNI), identity/mesh frameworks, and isolation technologies.
• Technical Anchor & Stakeholder Management: Proven track record communicating architectural trade-offs, driving company-wide consensus, and leading multi-team technical roadmaps.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: San Mateo base salary range ($345,040 – $399,420 USD) + competitive Roblox equity compensation.
• Healthcare & Wellbeing: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance packages for employees and eligible dependents.
• Onsite Perks & Campus: Modern San Mateo headquarters featuring daily catered meals, team events, and state-of-the-art technical setups.
• Time Off & Retirement: Generous vacation policies, paid company holidays, paid parental leave, and 401(k) matching programs.