Principal Database Platform Engineer - Roblox

The Briefed; San Mateo (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a Principal Database Engineer to shape architecture and drive storage innovations for a globally scaled platform. You will influence query planning, replication protocols, and open-source integrations while mentoring teams across Storage and Platform groups.

Reporting to the Technical Director for Storage, you will lead design reviews, performance benchmarking, and automation efforts to keep Roblox’s services fast and reliable at extreme scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience architecting and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement core database engine features including indexing, WAL, replication, and sharding.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, self-healing, and zero-downtime migrations across regions.
• Profile critical code paths and reduce tail latencies for high-QPS workloads.
• Lead design reviews, benchmarking, and incident retrospectives to improve reliability.
• Build automated tests, CI/CD pipelines, rollout safety, and autoscaling logic.
• Mentor engineers and upstream patches to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, and related projects.

Skills

Distributed systems

Database internals

C/C++

Go

Rust

Raft/Paxos

Kubernetes

Nomad

Observability

Performance optimization

Tools

Kubernetes

Nomad

Job description

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect within 3D immersive digital experiences. Roblox's mission is to connect a billion people with optimism and civility across any device worldwide.

Roblox's Database Team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload across the company. As a Principal Database Engineer, you will shape the overall architecture, design core engine internals, and launch critical storage capabilities that keep Roblox's global services fast, reliable, and efficient at extreme scale. Reporting to the Technical Director for Storage, you will drive storage engine innovation across query planning, replication protocols, control plane automation, and open-source database ecosystems (PostgreSQL, RocksDB).

Key Responsibilities

• Storage Engine Architecture: Design and implement new core database engine features—including custom indexing, storage formats, write-ahead logging (WAL), replication protocols, sharding mechanisms, and query-planner optimizations.
• Control Plane Evolution: Evolve the database control plane to deliver elastic scaling, autonomous self-healing, and zero-downtime schema migrations or tenant relocations across global regions.
• Performance Tooling & Profiling: Profile critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and performance tooling to systematically drive down tail latencies across high-QPS workloads.
• Engineering Excellence: Lead design reviews, performance benchmarking, failure injection drills, and post-incident retrospectives to raise the platform reliability bar.
• Automation & Observability: Build automated testing frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, rollout safety systems, and autoscaling logic so the platform operates autonomously.
• Mentorship & Open Source: Mentor engineers across Storage and Platform organizations while actively engaging with the open-source community by upstreaming patches to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, and related storage projects.

Requirements

Academic & Years of Experience

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building complex systems.
• Deep, hands-on experience architecting and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).

Technical Expertise & Languages

• Deep expertise in database internals—including B-trees, MVCC, write-ahead logging (WAL), query optimization, and buffer management.
• Strong programming proficiency in C/C++, Go, or Rust.
• Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models delivering strong consistency and high availability.
• Demonstrated success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability architectures.

Leadership & Soft Skills

• Proven ability to translate ambiguous requirements into concrete technical roadmaps and influence cross-functional technical stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven engineering decision-making.

Preferred Qualifications

• Upstream code contributions to open-source database projects (e.g., PostgreSQL, RocksDB).
• Familiarity with disaggregated storage architectures, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.

Work Logistics & Visa Sponsorship Notice

• Workplace Model: Hybrid model requiring in-office attendance at San Mateo HQ on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays (Mondays/Fridays optional).
• Visa Sponsorship Note: Roblox currently may not be able to support future H-1B sponsorship or candidates holding certain U.S. visa categories for this specific role.