Principal Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Description

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 data infrastructure processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a Principal Software Engineer in our Data Infra org, you will be the primary technical leader driving the strategic vision, long-term architecture, and massive scalability of our distributed data platforms that power Roblox. You will own and drive the next-generation architecture of our core platforms, which span Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow and Data Catalog. This role operates under high ambiguity, demanding unparalleled ownership to redefine the limits of infrastructure handling exabyte-scale workloads, and providing a unique opportunity to lead the future evolution of our global data ecosystem. You Will: - Define Multi-Year Technical Strategy: Own and drive the end-to-end architectural vision for Roblox's core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems. Turn multi-year company strategies into concrete, production-grade infrastructure blueprints. - Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams across Roblox to align technical roadmaps with business-critical metrics. Act as a trusted technical advisor, ensuring centralized infrastructure meets strict platform requirements. - Optimize Performance Engine Internals: Deep-dive into distributed engine internals, complex query planning, state management, serialization efficiency, and advanced memory optimization techniques to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency under peak compute loads. - Pioneer Autonomous Agentic Interfaces: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI/ML capabilities and large language models (LLMs) within our core data platform to deliver self-serve data discovery, automated metadata generation, and intelligent autonomous interaction layers. - Cultivate Engineering Excellence: Set the baseline for code quality, architectural stand