Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

Overview

Principal Software Engineer on Roblox's database team, shaping the architecture of the next-generation multi-tenant database platform that underpins every online data workload at Roblox.

What you'll do

• Design and implement new engine features, including indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements, that push latency, throughput, and availability boundaries.
• Evolve the control plane to deliver elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema or tenant moves across global regions.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling; drive systematic tail-latency reductions.
• Establish engineering best practices by leading design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Automate everything: develop frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling so the platform operates hands-off at scale.
• Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering database craftsmanship and disseminating knowledge across Storage, Platform, and product teams.
• Engage with the open-source community, upstreaming patches, presenting learnings, and influencing the future of Postgres, RocksDB and related ecosystems.

What you'll need

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).
• Deep expertise in database internals, including B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, and buffer management.
• Strong skills in C/C++, Go, or Rust.
• Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver strong consistency and high availability.
• Proven success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making that raises the reliability and efficiency bar.

Nice to have

• Upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other open-source databases.
• Familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.

Details

• Location: San Mateo, CA, United States (headquarters).
• Office roles are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.
• Reports to the Technical Director for Storage.
• Annual base salary range: $345,040 to $399,420 USD, plus equity compensation and benefits for full-time employees.
• For US-based roles only: the Company may not be able to employ candidates who have US work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.