Principal DB Platform Engineer: Scale & Innovate

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

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.