Principal Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device.</span><strong> </strong><span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.</span></p></div><p><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Roblox's data infrastructure processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a <strong>Principal Software Engineer</strong> in our <strong>Data Infra</strong> org, you will be the primary technical leader driving the strategic vision, long-term architecture, and massive scalability of our distributed data platforms that power Roblox. You will own and drive the next-generation architecture of our core platforms, which span Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow and Data Catalog. This role operates under high ambiguity, demanding unparalleled ownership to redefine the limits of infrastructure handling exabyte-scale workloads, and providing a unique opportunity to lead the future evolution of our global data ecosystem.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>You Will:</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Define Multi-Year Technical Strategy: </strong>Own and drive the end-to-end architectural vision for Roblox's core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems. Turn multi-year company strategies into concrete, production-grade infrastructure blueprints.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Lead Cross-Functional Alignment:</strong> Partner closely with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams across Roblox to align technical roadmaps with business-critical metrics. Act as a trusted technical advisor, ensuring centralized infrastructure meets strict platform requirements.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Optimize Performance Engine Internals:</strong> Deep-dive into distributed engine internals, complex query planning, state management, serialization efficiency, and advanced memory optimization techniques to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency under peak compute loads.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Pioneer Autonomous Agentic Interfaces:</strong> Spearhead the integration of advanced AI/ML capabilities and large language models (LLMs) within our core data platform to deliver self-serve data discovery, automated metadata generation, and intelligent autonomous interaction layers.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Cultivate Engineering Excellence:</strong> Set the baseline for code quality, architectural standards, and system robustness across the organization. Mentor staff, senior, and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, deep-dive post-incident analyses, and proactive chaos engineering validation.</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>You Have:</strong></span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">8+ years of experience building, designing, testing and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Data Platform Depth:</strong> Expert-level mastery and a deep history of building with foundational data technologies within our tech stack: Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Hive, Airflow, or advanced Data Catalog / Metadata systems.</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Infrastructure Core Builder:</strong> A proven track record of architecting, writing, and deploying core data platform code and distributed systems from the ground up. We are looking for someone who builds the engine rather than someone who just maintains or configures existing setups. You have driven major structural overhauls and 1-to-N platform evolutions at hyper-scale (100M+ active users).</span></li> <li style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><strong>Strong…