Senior Software Engineer (Backend), Communication

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>As a Senior Software Engineer on the Communications team, you'll own the backend systems that power chat and messaging for millions of players on Roblox and support billions of messages per day.</p> <p>Your day-to-day will focus on building and scaling the infrastructure that makes in-game communication fast, safe, and reliable. That means driving architectural decisions, creating communication modes that don't exist yet, and defining developer-facing APIs so creators can build richer experiences. You'll work closely with frontend engineers, platform, product, and design, and you'll have real influence over the technical and product direction of the team.</p> <p>If you're an experienced engineer who gets excited about large-scale distributed systems and wants to shape the way millions of people connect inside virtual worlds, we'd love to talk.</p> <h2>You Will</h2> <ul> <li>Build and scale backend infrastructure for millions of concurrent users, architecting high-throughput distributed services, integrating ML models, and enabling rapid product experimentation</li> <li>Equip creators with the APIs and tools to build deeply integrated social experiences in their games</li> <li>Own projects end-to-end: from design and architecture through production and long-term reliability</li> <li>Raise the bar on engineering standards through rigorous design, testing, and diligent code review</li> <li>Collaborate cross-functionally with teams across Roblox, including Game Engine, Creator, and Safety</li> <li>Mentor engineers on the team and contribute to recruiting future talent</li> </ul> <h2>You Are</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Experienced:</strong> 7+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production</li> <li><strong>Systems-fluent:</strong> comfortable with relational databases at scale (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL) and low-level concepts like threading, memory management, networking, and storage</li> <li><strong>Protocol-savvy:</strong> well-versed in HTTP, UDP, gRPC, and WebSockets</li> <li><strong>Analytical: </strong>you like digging into ambiguous problems and quantifying both the issue and the solution</li> <li><strong>Rigorous:</strong> you design for failure, write thorough tests, and build systems that stay up</li> <li><strong>Collaborative:</strong> you write clear design specs, align cross-functional partners, and guide projects from start to finish</li> <li><strong>Kind and generous:</strong> You treat colleagues with respect, assume good intent, and go out of your way to help others succeed</li> <li><strong>Bonus:</strong> experience with communication products, C++, ML model integration, or big data tools (Spark, Airflow, Hive)</li> </ul><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p>For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on <strong><a href="https://careers.roblox.com/total-rewards">this page</a></strong>.</p></div><div class="title">Annual Salary Range</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$243,290</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$295,250 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><p>Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).</p> <p>Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local…