Principal Software Engineer, Ads Platform

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.

With Roblox’s daily active users growing at a record pace, we are seeking a Principal Engineer to join the Ads Platform team to help build the next generation of Ads infrastructure. Our team sits at the core of all advertising systems at Roblox, serving billions of ads to millions of daily users, while powering high-scale, high-throughput data systems that shape ads personalization, ranking, and measurement.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the Ads Platform team, you will be responsible for setting technical direction and leading the team in its mission to reliably serve Roblox’s massive scale. You will drive performance improvements to our ads serving and delivery infrastructure, while expanding our systems to support a variety of new and immersive ads experiences. Your scope will span across multiple teams and require close collaboration with engineers across ML, backend, and analytics to shape the future of ads infrastructure at Roblox.

This role is a great fit for you if you are proficient in managing large scale systems and data-driven applications and have a zeal for developing inspiring, easily maintainable, and reusable code. Join our highly skilled and rapidly growing team and make a significant impact at Roblox.

This position will report to our Senior Engineering Manager and require you to work onsite at our HQ in San Mateo, CA Tuesdays to Thursdays.

You Will:

• Build and ship best-in-class Ads products used by hundreds of millions of users.

• Develop backend services that scale to billions of products and transactions.

• Be a tech lead and mentor junior engineers

• Self-organize and take ownership of projects throughout their full lifecycle.

You Have

• 8+ years of experience in software development and shipping products to production

• 4+ years of server-side architecture/design at scale and compiled language experience such as C#, Java, C++, or others.

• 4+ years of experience identifying and driving solutions to difficult problems that span multiple teams and require deep technical expertise.

• Knowledge with REST, GRPC, distributed systems design, and scalable containerized systems and microservices

You Are:

• A Technical Leader: You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical solutions. Your technical expertise influences product direction. You nurture a culture of technical excellence.

• Data & System Oriented: You understand that robust data is the foundation of great ML systems, and you design infrastructure for scale, correctness, and reliability.

• Collaborative: You thrive in cross-functional teams, partnering effectively with ML, backend, and product engineers to solve complex challenges.

• Curious & Creative: You enjoy tackling hard problems, exploring new technologies, and driving continuous improvements in both systems and workflows.

• Impact Driven: You focus on outcomes - prioritizing product impact, reliability, and measurable success over code volume or complexity.

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 this page.

Annual Salary Range
$293,800—$343,340 USD

Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).

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 laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.