Principal Software Engineer, Connections (Backend)

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.

As a Principal Software Engineer on the User Connections team, you will define the backend systems that power the social ecosystem ranging from Friending, Profiles (Identity + Expression), and other Social engagement. You will tech lead the engineering team, influence service architecture designs, and guide the team’s roadmap both technical and product. 

Your work will power the Roblox ecosystem, helping people recognize and connect with friends & interests on Roblox, express themselves, and discover & engage with the best of Roblox through their connections. You will own critical features used by millions of users daily, such as profiles, names, online presence, co-play tools, and social proof, as well as develop new zero-to-one features. You will drive company-level objectives for user engagement.

If you are an experienced developer with a deep understanding of large scale systems and enjoy shaping engineering vision, you’ll be right at home within our highly-skilled and product-focused team.

You Will:

• Tech lead the engineering team
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable backend systems to support hundreds of millions of users.
• Enforce high quality standards throughout feature development and iteration.
• Collaborate with other engineering, product, and design teams to define and build platform features to enable users to express their identities 
• Mentor engineers and uplevel the team

You Have:

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and supporting highly available and large-scale distributed fault tolerant services in production environments
• Extensive knowledge of server-side architecture and design principles, with proficiency in compiled languages such as C#, Java, C++, or others.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.
• (Bonus) Experience with social products is a plus.

You Are:

• Proactive: You operate with a sense of urgency, initiating conversations and workflow that pushes team projects and people forward.
• A Leader: You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical decisions across multiple teams and organizations.
• Scrappy: You are willing to dive into any tech stack to solve problems, and can easily adapt to any situation when the need arises and come up with the right solution.
• A product owner: You champion for changes that align with the needs of our users

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.

For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.