Principal Database Engineer — Global, Low-Latency Scale, Equity

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 345,000 - 399,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Benefits

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a principal engineer for the database team to shape architecture and launch critical capabilities at global scale.

You will lead design and implementation of features, ensure reliability, and drive performance across storage, replication, and orchestration layers. The role emphasizes mentorship, open-source collaboration, and scalable automation across Storage, Platform, and product teams.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering or related field.
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).
• Deep database internals knowledge: B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement engine features (indexing, storage formats, WAL, replication, sharding).
• Evolve control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime moves.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths; reduce tail latency.
• Establish engineering best practices via design reviews, benchmarks, drills, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Automate testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and share database craftsmanship across teams.
• Engage with open-source community and upstream patches.

Skills

C/C++

Go

Rust

Distributed databases

Container orchestration (Kubernetes)

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PostgreSQL

RocksDB

Kubernetes

MySQL/InnoDB

Spanner / distributed storage tech

Job description

Roblox is seeking a principal engineer for the database team to shape architecture and launch critical capabilities at global scale.

You will lead design and implementation of features, ensure reliability, and drive performance across storage, replication, and orchestration layers. The role emphasizes mentorship, open-source collaboration, and scalable automation across Storage, Platform, and product teams.