Principal Software Engineer - Video

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 Video team, you'll be responsible for building, operating, and evolving our video transcoding and playback platform and innovate on new uses for video in a 3D world. If you enjoy working with C++ and C# or other backend language while building products for the passionate community of Roblox developers and users, you'll be right at home within our experienced team.

This is a hands-on role developing and operating a complex video processing pipeline with bursty traffic and for someone who takes great pride in being able to sleep in on Saturday mornings.
You Will:

• Own our unique challenges of playing video in a 3D world while the video display size and CPU/GPU/RAM/network availability are changing.
• Leverage AI coding tools to make yourself even more efficient and productive.
• Evolve our video ingest, transcoding, processing, and streaming platform to serve the growing community of creators, working on our backend microservices platform, data pipelines, and the game engine.
• Employ best programming practices to write code that is efficient, robust, resilient, understandable, observable, and scalable.
• Play a crucial role improving the quality of video encoding and playback on a wide range of devices, from mobile to high-end platforms.
• Invent new creative uses for video in a 3D world.
• Work with teams all over Roblox, both engineering and non-technical, to bring product visions and proof of concepts to life.
• Be responsible for paying close attention to even the smallest details, driving both easy and hard problems to complete conclusions.

You Have:

• At least 8+ years of experience developing and deploying video systems
• Deep experience with adaptive video playback systems and how to craft an encoding ladder for optimal user experience.
• Knowledge of video quality metrics and how to use them to improve video quality in different scenarios.
• Successfully deployed a multi-service distributed system at scale with low costs and high availability, and worked with infra and product teams to get the job done.
• Familiarity with the challenges of working at scale, especially on constrained platforms like consoles and mobile devices
• Experience in performance optimization, creating data pipelines that process millions of records, creating data visualizations, and alerting on critical telemetry.
• Proficiency in C++ and C# or another backend language, with an understanding of parallel/concurrent programming concepts.
• Knowledge within the video domain and you love to pick up new technologies as the landscape evolves.

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.

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.