Lead Principal Engineer - Bare-Metal Object Storage

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

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Benefits as described on Roblox page

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a principal engineer for the Object Store team to design and operate an exabyte-scale, multi-tenant storage platform. You will shape architecture, drive data placement and tiering, and guide a broad set of engineers across on-prem infrastructure to deliver durable, high-throughput storage at global scale.

You will own multi-year strategy, lead architecture decisions away from cloud storage, and mentor teams while improving observability and automation.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage - object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems - at petabyte scale or beyond.
• Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production: data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale.
• Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
• Deep understanding of durability and replication - erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, blast-radius containment.
• Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.
• Bonus: upstream contributions to open-source storage projects; S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the object store - S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, multi-tenancy and isolation.
• Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
• Run the bare-metal fleet at scale - cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, hardware and capacity planning.
• Profile and optimize critical data paths; drive down tail latency and cost per byte.
• Establish engineering best practices - design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives - targeting 4+ 9s.
• Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.

Skills

C++

Go

Rust

Job description

Roblox is seeking a principal engineer for the Object Store team to design and operate an exabyte-scale, multi-tenant storage platform. You will shape architecture, drive data placement and tiering, and guide a broad set of engineers across on-prem infrastructure to deliver durable, high-throughput storage at global scale.

You will own multi-year strategy, lead architecture decisions away from cloud storage, and mentor teams while improving observability and automation.