Principal Software Engineer - Object Store

Overview

Principal Software Engineer on Roblox's Object Store team, building and operating the in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform that underpins large-object workloads at exabyte scale on bare metal in Roblox's own data centers.

What you'll do

• Design and build the object store, including the S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, and multi-tenancy and isolation.
• Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
• Run the bare-metal fleet at scale, covering cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, and hardware and capacity planning.
• Profile and optimize critical data paths, driving down tail latency and cost per byte.
• Establish engineering best practices, including design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives, targeting 4+ 9s.
• Automate testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.

What you'll need

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage (object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems) at petabyte scale or beyond.
• Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production, including data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale.
• Depth in operating these systems matters more than contributing to their internals.
• Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
• Deep understanding of durability and replication, including erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, and blast-radius containment.
• Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.

Nice to have

• Upstream contributions to open-source storage projects.
• S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage.

Details

• Location: San Mateo, CA, United States (headquarters).
• Reports to the Engineering Manager for Storage.
• Onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.
• Annual base salary range: $295,250 to $345,040 USD.
• Full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and benefits.
• For US-based roles only: the Company may not be able to employ candidates who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.