Principal Software Engineer, Core Services

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.

The Core Services team manages the core infrastructure and API stack and builds high throughput microservices that powers https://www.roblox.com. These services need to be fast, reliable and highly scalable as they have a huge impact on the day-to-day experience of every Roblox user. In addition, the team owns shared libraries, infrastructure microservices, and the web infrastructure used by all other Roblox full-stack feature teams. We ship with testable and configurable features that allow for rapid experimentation, data collection, and optimize for performance and user engagement. From serving basic user information to populating content into in-experience. Core Services is integral to the Roblox experience.

As a Principal Engineer within the team, you will own and drive the development and management of core infrastructure, API stack, and microservices. These components are essential for supporting a range of services and platforms within Roblox, including our studio environment. Additionally, you will contribute to the development of tooling and frameworks for full-stack teams. You will get the chance to take ownership of high RPS (requests per second) services, contribute to the re-architecture of systems to accommodate our company's growth, and collaborate with a diverse set of teams including Infra and the product teams within Roblox, leading initiatives, and making a significant impact across the company.

You will:

• Report into the Core Services Organization.

• Build, maintain, and scale systems to support our goal of 1 billion active users.

• Design, develop and test Kubernetes controllers using Go.

• Build and establish core infrastructure accessible to all Roblox teams.

• Enforce high code quality standards, architectural designs, and long-term approaches as a gatekeeper.

You have:

• 9+ years of experience building web services using Golang or similar language.

• Experience building and operating K8’s clusters.

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals (control plane, reconciliation loops, scheduling, networking).

• Experience building large scale distributed systems with focus on scalability, reliability, and availability.

• Experience building or operating control-plane or orchestration systems (e.g., schedulers, workflow engines, or compute platforms). Experience designing systems that handle multi-region orchestration, failover, disaster recovery, or large-scale reliability challenges.

• Strong knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals such as leader election, event-driven architectures, messaging/queuing, or distributed state management.

• Experience with Oncall and in troubleshooting live site issues.

• Experience leading cross team greenfield projects.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Experience writing Kubernetes Operators or custom controllers using Operator-SDK or control runtime (a plus).

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
$295,250—$345,040 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.