Lead ML Engineer, Matchmaking at Scale

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 295,000 - 345,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Benefits described on page

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a Principal ML Engineer for Matchmaking to own the technical vision and ML strategy for server placement and player experience. You will develop models, objective functions, and algorithms that balance player and developer utility with system efficiency across global datacenters.

You will lead other engineers, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and design end-to-end ML systems for data, features, training, serving, and evaluation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience delivering large-scale ML systems for ranking, recommendation, personalization, or resource allocation.
• Experience defining objective functions, building predictive models, and deploying optimization algorithms that balance user and business outcomes with production latency, reliability, and resource constraints.
• Ability to break down long-term product requirements into iterative deliverables and drive cross-team decisions.
• Empathy and strong communication to align multiple teams around technical decisions.
• Generalist mindset with fluency in several languages and technologies; adaptable.

Responsibilities

• Own the ML strategy and technical direction for matchmaking to optimize player and developer outcomes.
• Define and evolve the matchmaking objective function balancing utility, latency, and cost.
• Build predictive models and ranking components for high-value actions and long-term engagement.
• Design productionizable candidate-server retrieval, ranking, and assignment algorithms under real-time constraints.
• Lead engineers and mentor teams while promoting engineering excellence.
• Develop data, feature, training, serving, and evaluation systems for matchmaking ML.
• Collaborate with Discovery, Search, and infrastructure teams to tailor models per game needs.
• Define offline evaluations and run online experiments to improve models and objectives.
• Translate research into production improvements and share advances with the ML community.

Skills

Large-scale ML

Ranking models

Optimization

Predictive modeling

A/B testing

Cross-team collab

Programming languages

Education

BS in Computer Science

MS/PhD preferred

Tools

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Spark

Job description

Roblox is seeking a Principal ML Engineer for Matchmaking to own the technical vision and ML strategy for server placement and player experience. You will develop models, objective functions, and algorithms that balance player and developer utility with system efficiency across global datacenters.

You will lead other engineers, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and design end-to-end ML systems for data, features, training, serving, and evaluation.