Principal Distributed Database Engineer

Roblox Corporation; San Mateo, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 345,000 - 399,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Onsite office

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

Roblox Corporation seeks a Principal Software Engineer for the Roblox Database team to lead architecture and deliver highly scalable data platforms. You will shape features, improve latency, and ensure reliability across global regions.

The role requires deep database internals knowledge, experience with distributed systems, and mentoring across teams. You will collaborate with storage, platform, and product teams while engaging with open-source communities.

Qualifications

• Experience building large-scale distributed databases or storage engines.
• 12+ years in software engineering or a related field.
• Strong knowledge of database internals (B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization).
• Proficiency in C/C++, Go or Rust.
• Experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication.
• Shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on Kubernetes or Nomad with observability.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into a clear technical roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement new engine features—indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema moves.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths with advanced performance tooling.
• Establish engineering best practices through design reviews and incident retrospectives.
• Automate testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling.
• Mentor and unblock engineers across Storage, Platform, and product teams.
• Engage with the open-source community—upstreaming patches and sharing learnings.

Skills

Large-scale distributed databases

Multi-region replication

Kubernetes

Performance optimization

Mentoring

Tools

PostgreSQL

RocksDB

Nomad

Job description

Roblox Corporation seeks a Principal Software Engineer for the Roblox Database team to lead architecture and deliver highly scalable data platforms. You will shape features, improve latency, and ensure reliability across global regions.

The role requires deep database internals knowledge, experience with distributed systems, and mentoring across teams. You will collaborate with storage, platform, and product teams while engaging with open-source communities.