Senior Engineering Manager, Communications

Overview

Lead the engineering team responsible for Roblox's in-game text chat, owning the technical vision, roadmap and organization behind one of the platform's most-used communication surfaces.

What you'll do

• Lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers building the in-game text chat platform, setting a high bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and career growth.
• Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging, balancing new product capabilities against scale, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Drive the architecture and evolution of messaging systems that reliably deliver billions of messages per day at low latency to a global, cross-platform audience.
• Partner with product and design to shape a compelling communication experience, treating chat as a product, not just infrastructure, and translate ambiguous goals into concrete plans and shipped features.
• Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to ensure every messaging experience is safe and civil by design for a young, global user base.
• Establish strong engineering practices around quality, observability, on-call health, and operational excellence for systems that must always be available.
• Communicate clearly and influence across the organization, with peers, leadership, and cross-functional partners, to align teams behind a shared direction.

What you'll need

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams.
• A track record of building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale, ideally messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems.
• Strong product intuition: thoughtful tradeoffs between user experience, technical complexity, and speed, and care about what you ship, not just how it's built.
• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong grasp of reliability, latency, and running high-throughput services in production.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers, and to build healthy, high-performing teams.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a history of driving alignment across product, design, and engineering.
• A bias toward action and comfort with ambiguity, especially at high scale.

Nice to have

• Experience with real-time messaging protocols, presence systems, or high-fanout delivery infrastructure.
• Background in trust & safety, content moderation, or safety-critical systems.
• Experience building communication or social features for large, global, or youth audiences.
• Familiarity with cross-platform (mobile, console, desktop) product development.

Details

• Base location: San Mateo, CA, United States (headquarters).
• Office-based roles are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday.
• Full-time employment, 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.