Principal Software Engineer - Object Store San Mateo, CA, United States Engineering

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

Principal Software Engineer - Object Store

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.

Roblox's Object Store team is building the in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform that underpins every large-object workload at Roblox — assets, media, analytics, backups, and machine learning datasets — at exabyte scale, trillions of objects, and terabytes per second of throughput. We build and run it ourselves on bare metal in our own data centers, replacing cloud object storage with a platform we control end to end — down to the hardware. As a principal engineer on the Object Store team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch the capabilities that keep this platform durable, fast, and efficient at global scale, and set the technical direction for where it goes next. You will report to the Engineering Manager for Storage.

You will:

• 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 — targeting 4+ 9s.
• Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
• Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.

You have:

• 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. Depth operating these systems matters more here than contributing to their internals.
• 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.

Annual Salary Range

$295,250 — $345,040 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.