About the position
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. 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. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. 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. Roblox’s database team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload at Roblox. As a principal engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch critical database capabilities that keep our services fast, reliable and efficient at global scale. You will report to the Technical Director for Storage.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement new engine features—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 that the platform operates hands-off at scale.
- Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering deep 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.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
- Deep experience with building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).
- Deep expertise in database internals—B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management—and 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-haves
- Upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases.
- Familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.
Benefits
- Equity compensation
- Health insurance
- 401k
- Paid time off
- Flexible work schedule
