Principal DB Engineer — Scale & Distributed Storage

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 294,000 - 343,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Job summary

Roblox’s database team is building the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload. As a principal engineer on the Storage team, you will shape architecture, build critical database capabilities, and drive latency, throughput, and reliability at global scale.

Based in San Mateo, CA, you will mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and collaborate with open-source communities around PostgreSQL and RocksDB.

Qualifications

• 8 years of software engineering experience.
• Deep experience with large-scale distributed databases or storage engines.
• Strong knowledge of database internals (B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization).
• Experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication.
• Proficient in C/C++, Go or Rust.
• Experience with Kubernetes or Nomad and observability.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement new engine features for performance and scalability.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling and zero-downtime schema moves.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths with advanced tooling.
• Lead design reviews, benchmarks, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Automate testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, and autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers across Storage, Platform, and product teams.
• Engage with open-source communities around Postgres and RocksDB.

Skills

Distributed databases

Database internals

C/C++

Go or Rust

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

RocksDB

Tools

Kubernetes

Nomad

Job description

Roblox’s database team is building the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload. As a principal engineer on the Storage team, you will shape architecture, build critical database capabilities, and drive latency, throughput, and reliability at global scale.

Based in San Mateo, CA, you will mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and collaborate with open-source communities around PostgreSQL and RocksDB.