Sr. Engineering Manager - Social Systems | Roblox

As Senior Engineering Manager for Communications, you will lead the engineering organization responsible for in-game text chat—one of the most heavily utilized surfaces on Roblox. Delivering billions of real-time messages daily across hundreds of millions of global users across 2D and 3D spaces on mobile, desktop, console, and VR devices, this platform is a cornerstone of player connection. In this dual technical and product leadership role, you will build and grow a high-performing engineering team, define multi-quarter technical roadmaps, and partner closely across Product, Design, Trust & Safety, and Infrastructure to ship expressive, reliable, and safe messaging experiences at massive scale.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership & Engineering Culture

• Team Growth & Talent Development: Recruit, mentor, and retain a high-performing team of software engineers, fostering a culture grounded in technical excellence, accountability, and continuous career growth.
• Operational Excellence & System Health: Establish engineering practices around code quality, system observability, automated testing, on-call health, and operational resilience for mission-critical services that require 24/7/365 availability.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Communicate strategic direction clearly, building strong alignment across Engineering, Product, Design, Infrastructure, and executive leadership.

Architecture, Roadmap & Safety Infrastructure

• Technical Strategy & Execution: Own the multi-quarter technical roadmap for real-time text chat, balancing product innovation against ultra-low latency requirements, massive throughput, high availability, and infrastructure cost efficiency.
• Distributed Messaging Architecture: Drive the architecture and continuous scaling of real-time messaging pipelines delivering billions of messages per day to a global cross-platform audience.
• Product & Design Partnership: Treat chat as a core user product—balancing technical complexity against user experience to ship expressive, intuitive, and engaging communication tools.
• Trust & Safety Collaboration: Partner deeply with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to bake safety-by-design, automated content moderation, and civility controls into every messaging surface for a global youth audience.

Requirements

Management Track Record & Technical Mastery

• Experience Track: 8+ years of total software engineering experience, including 3+ years directly managing, mentoring, and growing software engineering teams.
• Consumer Product Track Record: Demonstrated success building, shipping, and scaling high-throughput, consumer-facing applications (preferably in real-time messaging, social platforms, or communications infrastructure).
• Product Intuition: Strong product intuition with the ability to evaluate trade-offs between technical complexity, system latency, user experience, and execution speed.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems, with a clear understanding of fault tolerance, high-fanout architecture, and production SRE practices.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a history of driving alignment across cross-functional engineering, product, and safety orgs.
• Action & Ambiguity: Strong bias toward action, comfortable navigating ambiguous product requirements at multi-million user scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with real-time messaging protocols (WebSockets, MQTT, gRPC, XMPP), presence engines, or high-fanout pub/sub message delivery architectures.
• Background building safety-critical systems, automated content moderation pipelines, or Trust & Safety infrastructure.
• Experience delivering communications features tailored to global youth or gaming audiences.
• Practical experience with cross-platform development across mobile (iOS/Android), console, desktop, and VR environments.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: San Mateo base salary range ($345,040 – $399,420 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.