Principal Software Engineer - Content Discovery | Roblox

As Principal Software Engineer on the Sharing team, you will lead large, multi-team initiatives driving the platform-wide strategy for how millions of users capture, share, and discover content on Roblox. In this group-level technical leadership role, you will set the multi-year architecture for content creation, media processing, and viral sharing loops across consumer surfaces. You will serve as a key architect of Roblox's long-term backend direction, establishing engineering standards, authoring foundational frameworks to accelerate developer velocity, and acting as the escalation authority for complex, high-severity production incidents.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Distributed Backend Foundations

• Multi-Year Technical Vision: Develop and execute the long-term technical architecture for content creation, capturing, and social sharing across Roblox, anticipating platform scale and business evolution.
• Architectural Foundations: Modernize shared infrastructure and core systems—introducing reusable backend frameworks and scalable APIs that elevate development speed across the engineering organization.
• Multi-Team Alignment: Align multiple engineering teams behind a unified technical direction, delivering detailed architectural design documents, phased execution roadmaps, and capacity planning models.
• Operational Excellence: Serve as the ultimate technical escalation point for high-severity production and infrastructure incidents, driving root-cause mitigation and systemic reliability guardrails.

Engineering Culture & Leadership

• Talent Cultivation & Mentorship: Mentor senior engineers, elevate technical decision-making across pods, and actively participate in hiring, interviewing, and retaining top-tier engineering talent.
• Engineering Quality: Lead engineering excellence initiatives, promoting high-throughput system patterns, strict code quality standards, and resilient distributed systems design.

Requirements

Distributed Systems Mastery & Technical Leadership

• Experience Track: 8+ years of professional experience building and operating large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Backend Stack Expertise: Deep software engineering foundation in high-performance languages such as C++, C#, or Java.
• System Design Depth: Extensive track record of designing fault-tolerant distributed systems, high-throughput microservices, and consumer-facing RESTful/gRPC APIs.
• Consumer Scale Track Record: Direct experience architecting software for massive consumer-facing platforms serving millions of active users.
• Multi-Team Leadership: Proven capability to lead multi-team engineering programs spanning multiple quarters or years with group-level organizational impact.
• Incident Management: Experience acting as a primary escalation point for complex infrastructure incidents and defining long-term technical investment strategies with executive leadership.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience building viral sharing pipelines, media encoding/transcoding infrastructure, or real-time content delivery systems.
• Deep familiarity with distributed storage engines, edge caching architectures, or content graph recommendation platforms.
• Track record of driving platform-wide technical transformations across multi-hundred-person engineering organizations.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: San Mateo base salary range ($295,250 – $345,040 USD) + competitive Roblox equity compensation package.
• 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.