Principal Software Engineer - Service Networking

Overview

Principal Software Engineer on Roblox's Service Networking team, setting technical direction and leading hands-on development of the systems that make service-to-service communication reliable, secure, and efficient.

What you'll do

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for service mesh, balancing reliability, security, performance, and operating cost.
• Design and build control-plane and data-plane capabilities for service discovery, routing, load balancing, and traffic policy using Envoy, Istio, and related technologies.
• Lead integration and migration across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments, with clear compatibility requirements and safe rollout plans.
• Partner with Security and application teams to deliver workload identity, mutual TLS, and traffic policy enforcement in production.
• Improve resource efficiency and operational reliability through performance analysis, testing, observability, incident response, and deployment automation.
• Lead technical decisions across teams, write and review production code, and mentor senior engineers to expand their judgment and ownership.

What you'll need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including leading substantial initiatives across teams.
• Expertise in service mesh, proxies, application gateways, or a closely related infrastructure domain, demonstrated through systems you have designed, shipped, and operated.
• A strong understanding of networking fundamentals, service discovery, traffic management, failure isolation, and secure service communication.
• Strong programming skills in Go, C++, Rust, or another systems language, with experience debugging across application, proxy, control-plane, and operating-system boundaries.
• Experience operating Kubernetes or comparable orchestration platforms in production and leading infrastructure migrations or performance improvements.
• A record of turning ambiguous problems into technical direction and coordinated execution, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and helping other engineers lead independently.

Nice to have

• Envoy/Istio internals, xDS, workload identity, and substantive open-source contributions.

Details

• Location: San Mateo, CA, United States (headquarters).
• Onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.
• Annual salary range $295,250 — $345,040 USD, plus equity compensation for full-time employees.
• 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.