Principal Engineer, Exabyte-Scale Object Store

Roblox Corporation; San Mateo, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 295,000 - 345,000; Full time

Job summary

Roblox Corporation is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Object Store team. You will design and build an in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform powering assets, analytics, backups, and ML datasets at exabyte scale. You will shape architecture, drive multi-year strategy, and lead bare-metal deployments globally.

You will mentor engineers, optimize data paths for low latency, and champion automation, testing, and observability in a fast-paced, on-prem environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage—object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems—at petabyte scale or beyond.
• Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production: data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale.
• Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
• Deep understanding of durability and replication—erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, blast-radius containment.
• Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.
• Bonus: upstream contributions to open-source storage projects; S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the object store — S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, multi-tenancy and isolation.
• Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
• Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
• Run the bare-metal fleet at scale — cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, hardware and capacity planning.
• Profile and optimize critical data paths; drive down tail latency and cost per byte.
• Establish engineering best practices — design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives.
• Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.

Skills

Large-scale storage

Object storage platforms

C++/Go/Rust

Automation and testing

Data-driven decisions

Cross-functional influence

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Observability tooling

Bare-metal / on-prem systems

Erasure coding concepts

Job description

Roblox Corporation is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the Object Store team. You will design and build an in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform powering assets, analytics, backups, and ML datasets at exabyte scale. You will shape architecture, drive multi-year strategy, and lead bare-metal deployments globally.

You will mentor engineers, optimize data paths for low latency, and champion automation, testing, and observability in a fast-paced, on-prem environment.