Principal Security Software Engineer, IAM

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 326,000 - 385,000; Full time

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a Principal Security Software Engineer to set the technical direction for identity and access across its production infrastructure. You will define end-to-end identity for machine, workload, human, and AI-agent access in a hybrid on‑prem and cloud environment, and drive secure enforcement through SPIFFE/SPIRE, service mesh, and vault-based secret management.

You will lead architecture, publish RFCs, mentor senior engineers, and shape multi-year roadmaps while enabling

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience building scalable, distributed backend systems.
• Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication, authorization, and access-control models such as RBAC, ABAC, or risk-based access control.
• Hands-on experience with PKI, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, service mesh, secret management (e.g., Vault), and PAM.
• Proficiency in at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python, or C#/.NET.
• Experience leading the technical work of other engineers — setting direction across teams, writing influential design docs, and mentoring senior talent.
• AI fluency: you use AI tools in your daily workflow, understand LLM capabilities and limitations, and can reason about AI agent identities and permissions.
• A Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture for production identity and access across Roblox's hybrid on‑prem and cloud fleet.
• Drive mTLS and workload identity to full production enforcement.
• Advance just‑in‑time, least-privilege access for engineers with auditable, short-lived credentials.
• Mature the centralized authorization engine and RBAC/ABAC models for consistency and testability.
• Define patterns for AI agent identity and scoped permissions across lifecycle.
• Draft RFCs and roadmaps; mentor engineers and raise technical bar.

Skills

IAM expertise

Distributed backend

System design

Go

Rust

Java

Python

C++

C#/.NET

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or related field

Tools

PKI & TLS

mTLS

SPIFFE/SPIRE

Service mesh

Vault

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.

As a Principal Security Software Engineer on the Production IAM team, you will set the technical direction for how identity and access work across Roblox's production infrastructure, from the mTLS-based identity that services use to authenticate to one another, to the privileged access controls that govern how engineers reach production. The team is accountable for Roblox's machine and workload identity platform, its centralized authorization engine, its production access management platform, production PKI and certificate lifecycle, and just-in-time privileged access for engineers. As an individual contributor in Production IAM, you will define multi-year strategy, drive alignment across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and personally build the hardest parts of these systems. As AI agents become first-class actors in production, you will also help pioneer how they get identity, prove who they are, and receive safely-scoped access.

You will

• Lead the architecture for production identity and access. Define and evolve the end-to-end design for machine, workload, human, and AI-agent identity across our hybrid on-prem and cloud fleet, making secure access invisible when it can be and intuitive when it needs attention.
• Drive mTLS and workload identity to full production enforcement. Lead the technical strategy for our SPIFFE/SPIRE-based identity platform, service-mesh integration, managed service accounts, and certificate issuance, storage, and rotation.
• Advance just-in-time, least-privilege access for engineers. Architect just-in-time, least-privilege, and break-glass access to production, replacing static, long-lived credentials with short-lived, auditable access that stays reliable even during dependency or identity-provider outages.
• Evolve the centralized authorization engine and a secure golden path. Mature our centralized authorization engine and the access-control models behind it (RBAC/ABAC and risk-based access) so decisions are consistent, fine-grained, and testable.
• Pioneer identity and access for AI agents. Define how agents obtain credentials, receive scoped permissions, and have their sessions managed across their lifecycle, setting the patterns for agentic identity at Roblox..
• Lead across the org and raise the bar. Author RFCs and multi-year roadmaps, align stakeholders across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and raise the technical bar through design review, on-call ownership, and hiring.

You have

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience building scalable, distributed backend systems, with a track record of driving architecture end to end.
• Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication, authorization, and access-control models such as RBAC, ABAC, or risk-based access control.
• Hands‑on experience with several of: PKI and certificate/key lifecycle management, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE or comparable workload‑identity systems, service mesh, secret management (e.g., Vault), and privileged access management (PAM).
• Proficiency in at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python, or C# .NET, and a habit of building systems rather than only configuring vendor tools.
• Experience leading the technical work of other engineers — setting direction across teams, writing influential design docs, and mentoring senior talent.
• AI fluency: you use AI tools in your daily workflow, understand LLM capabilities and limitations, and can reason about what it means to give an AI agent an identity and permissions.
• A Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.

You are

• A systems thinker. You reason about failure modes, blast radius, and reliability, and you design access that stays secure and available even when dependencies fail.
• Security-minded and pragmatic. You are passionate about least privilege and zero trust, but you optimize for the Builder experience and adoption, not controls for their own sake.
• A force multiplier. You make the engineers and teams around you better through mentorship, clear writing, and high-quality technical leadership.
• A strong communicator. You translate deep technical tradeoffs for both engineers and executives, and you build alignment across organizational boundaries.
• Bar-raising and hands‑on. You still love to build, and you set the standard for engineering quality on the hardest problems.

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.

Annual Salary Range

$326,060 — $385,050 USD

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.

For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H‑1B sponsorship at this time.