Principal Software Engineer - Service Networking San Mateo, CA, United States Engineering

Principal Software Engineer - Service Networking

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 Application Networking team connects and secures the services behind our platform across our data centers and cloud infrastructure.

As a Principal Software Engineer on Service Mesh, you will set technical direction and lead hands-on development of the systems that make service-to-service communication reliable, secure, and efficient. You will guide the evolution of our Envoy- and Istio-based platform as services move across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments. You will partner with Compute, Security, and application teams, and help senior engineers lead complex technical work.

You will:

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for service mesh, balancing reliability, security, performance, and operating cost.
• Design and build control-plane and data-plane capabilities for service discovery, routing, load balancing, and traffic policy using Envoy, Istio, and related technologies.
• Lead integration and migration across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments, with clear compatibility requirements and safe rollout plans.
• Partner with Security and application teams to deliver workload identity, mutual TLS, and traffic policy enforcement in production.
• Improve resource efficiency and operational reliability through performance analysis, testing, observability, incident response, and deployment automation.
• Lead technical decisions across teams, write and review production code, and mentor senior engineers to expand their judgment and ownership.

You have:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, including leading substantial initiatives across teams.
• Expertise in service mesh, proxies, application gateways, or a closely related infrastructure domain, demonstrated through systems you have designed, shipped, and operated.
• A strong understanding of networking fundamentals, service discovery, traffic management, failure isolation, and secure service communication.
• Strong programming skills in Go, C++, Rust, or another systems language, with experience debugging across application, proxy, control-plane, and operating-system boundaries.
• Experience operating Kubernetes or comparable orchestration platforms in production and leading infrastructure migrations or performance improvements. Envoy/Istio internals, xDS, workload identity, and substantive open-source contributions are especially relevant.
• A record of turning ambiguous problems into technical direction and coordinated execution, communicating tradeoffs clearly, and helping other engineers lead independently.

You’ll Love:

• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• A rewarding 401k program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Roflex - Flexible and supportive work policy
• At Roblox HQ:
• Free catered lunches five times a week and several fully stocked kitchens with unlimited snacks
• Onsite fitness center and fitness program credit
• Annual CalTrain Go Pass

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.