Principal Detection and Response Engineer

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 295,250 - 345,040; Full time

Job summary

A leading gaming platform in San Mateo, CA is seeking a Principal Security Engineer to design and develop effective security data pipelines and response strategies. The successful candidate will have over 8 years of experience in security detection and response, along with a passion for creating efficient systems. This hybrid role involves collaboration across teams to enhance the safety of the platform. An annual salary range of $295,250 — $345,040 USD is offered, along with equity compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in Detection and/or Response.
• 4+ years in Security Data Engineering with streaming pipelines.
• Strong mastery of building scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop customized data processing pipelines.
• Monitor security events and lead incident response.
• Collaborate with internal teams on scalable solutions.

Skills

Detection and response

Security engineering

Threat hunting

Incident management

Programming languages (C, Golang, Java)

Crisis management

Problem-solving

Tools

Kafka

Apache Flink

BigQuery

SIEM

EDR

SOAR technologies

Job description

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.

At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.

A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.

About the role:

As a Principal Security Engineer on the Detection and Response (D&R) team at Roblox, you’ll play a key role designing and developing effective custom security data pipeline systems, detection strategies and automations for response workflows to defend our critical assets from threat actors. You will also lead real‑time incident response, actively investigate events and analyze threat actor techniques to prioritize emerging threats to ensure Roblox is equipped to mitigate and react to critical challenges. You will play a vital part to ensure the safety of our community and enterprise by proactively fostering a high‑performing, inclusive security culture. This is a hybrid in‑office role.

You Will:

• Be a D&R authority! You will deliver robust detection & response capabilities: build new threat detection systems (keeping false positives low) while also automating processes with scripts, playbooks and orchestration tooling.
• Implement ETL pipelines: Design and develop customized data processing pipelines.
• Conduct security operations: Actively monitor security events and participate in on‑call rotations to lead real‑time incident response to contain and mitigate potential security issues.
• Build positive relationships: Collaborate with internal teams like InfoSec, Engineering, Product and Safety to design scalable solutions.
• Help grow the D&R team: Guide and support junior engineer careers and contribute to hiring.

You Have:

• 8+ years of experience in Detection and/or Response: with a passion for security engineering, threat detection, threat hunting, and incident management.
• 4+ years of Security Data Engineering experience with streaming pipelines: You’ve built production grade ETL data processing pipelines end to end using Kafka / PubSub, Spark / Flink, Athena / BigQuery or similar.
• Software Development (SWE): Mastery building efficient, reliable, CI/CD deployed, scalable systems using programming languages like C, Golang or Java.
• Engineering experience with SIEM, EDR, NDR, and SOAR technologies: You have on‑boarded logs in your sleep and built custom detections/automations for complex environments.
• Conducted incident response: Structured, mature incident response processes are your vocabulary to swiftly resolve security incidents. Afterwards, you use evidence and data to tell the story and ensure action items are meticulous and complete.
• Familiarity across multiple domains: Deep understanding of network protocols, operating systems, cloud environments, virtualized hosts, containers, in order to identify potential threats to each.
• Core security skills: Analytical thinking, crisis management, root cause analysis, and problem‑solving, with a meticulous approach to identifying, investigating, and responding to incidents.

Annual Salary Range

$295,250 — $345,040 USD

For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job‑related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full‑time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.

Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).

Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.