Distinguished Engineer, Machine Learning - Discovery San Mateo, CA, United States Engineering

Roblox Corporation; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 419,000 - 458,000; Full time

Job summary

Roblox Corporation is seeking a Distinguished Engineer/Technical Director on Discovery to set the technical vision for machine learning across search and discovery. You will drive content distribution and personalization at scale for billions of users and developers.

You will lead by example, co-design models and systems, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to push frontier in embedding-based retrieval, transformers, and LLM workflows while delivering real business impact.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering large-scale search and recommendation systems.
• Ability to translate long-term requirements into iterative deliverables.
• Strong collaboration across multiple teams and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for ML solutions powering search and recommendations.
• Define features/specs and AI strategy to improve candidate generation and ranking.
• Build and evolve training, serving, and evaluation infrastructure for ML models.
• Lead engineers through technical direction and foster engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with Roblox teams to align with product goals.
• Balance research with practical deployment to Roblox products.

Skills

10+ years experience

Large-scale ML models

ML for search & recommendations

Team leadership

Education

BS in Computer Science

MS/PhD preferred

Job 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.

As a Distinguished Engineer/Technical Director on Discovery, you’ll be in charge of the overall technical vision and execution for all machine learning initiatives across search and discovery teams. The mission of these teams is to connect a billion users with the best connections and content at the right time, covering a very diverse range of search and recommendation problems at a high scale. This is fundamental to how we personalize the experience to drive engagement and retention for Roblox users. With daily active users growing at a record rate, we are looking for expert tech leaders who are passionate about crafting and building machine learning solutions to power Search and Recommendations.

You Will:

• Own the technical direction and implementation for the machine learning solutions that power the search and recommendation systems, driving Roblox content distribution.
• Author specs for new features and improvements. You would be responsible for setting the AI strategy, pushing the frontier of recommendation technology, and driving business outcomes across candidate generation, ranking, objective functions, and value delivery for both users and developers.
• Build and evolve infrastructure for training, serving, and evaluating both traditional ML models and Generative AI models (e.g., embedding-based retrieval, transformers, LLM-based workflows)
• You will co-design models and systems, working at the intersection of model architecture and infrastructure, partnering closely with core modelers, data and AI infrastructure engineers, and product teams to push the boundaries of large-scale training and serving.
• Lead other engineers by example and through technical direction as an individual contributor and create an engineering culture of excellence
• Become an authority on our technology stack and make sure we always build new solutions the right way
• Collaborate with other teams within Roblox to make sure we are building products with community and company first attitude.
• Balance researching new technologies with a practical approach to realize the research efforts into the Roblox products
• Collaborate with the industry and communities where applicable and be ambassador for Roblox.

You Have:

• 10+ years of experience and a consistent record of delivering and improving large-scale search and recommendation systems.
• Experience crafting and building large scale machine learning models with billions of parameters and launching them into production.
• The capability of breaking down long-term product requirements into iterative deliverable stages.
• Initiated and facilitated challenging technical decisions across multiple teams and organizations. You are empathetic and find common understanding.
• Deep technical expertise, you always start with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users or internal engineers.
• A generalist approach and you have mastered several languages and technologies already; you can easily adapt to any situation.
• The ability to roll up your sleeves to tackle data problems or machine learning problems when they come up.
• A creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems. You simplify the complex. You bring in fresh ideas from new places.
• BS in Computer Science or a related discipline, MS/PhD are a definite plus.

Annual Salary Range

$419,390 — $457,970 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.