Roblox · 5 months ago
Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database
San Mateo, CA, United States
Full-time
Onsite
Lead/Staff
$289K/yr - $338K/yr
8+ years expRoblox is a platform where millions connect through immersive digital experiences created by a global community. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer for their database team to design and implement new engine features, evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, and establish engineering best practices to enhance their multi-tenant database platform.
3D TechnologyGamingMetaverseOnline GamesSoftwareVideo Games
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
Qualification
Required
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
Preferred
Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages
Benefits
Equity compensation
Company
Roblox
Roblox is an online gaming and entertainment platform that offers a shared digital experience that brings people together through play.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Roblox has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (240)
2024 (111)
2023 (139)
2022 (153)
2021 (91)
2020 (92)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$874.45MKey Investors
Andreessen HorowitzAltos Ventures
2024-10-01Post Ipo Equity
2022-04-12Series Unknown· $17.71M
2021-08-11Series Unknown
Leadership Team
David Baszucki
Founder and CEO
Michael Guthrie
CFO
Recent News
2026-01-11
2026-01-11
Company data provided by crunchbase