Principal Software Engineer, Safety Foundation | Roblox San Mateo

The Briefed; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation for all full-time

Benefits for full-time employees

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Safety Foundation in California. You will serve as hands-on tech lead, set architecture direction, and own systems scaling to support 10x traffic growth with AI-first safety workflows.

You will collaborate with Trust & Safety ML, User Safety, and product teams to deliver durable infrastructure, define backend standards, mentor engineers, and drive performance optimizations at scale. Strong Go and distributed systems background required.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building large-scale backend/distributed systems and shipping to production.
• 4+ years in tech lead roles, guiding direction and mentoring engineers.
• Deep proficiency in Go (preferred).
• Experience with NoSQL databases at scale (DynamoDB, Cassandra, or similar).
• Experience or strong interest in AI/ML platform integration, pipelines, and HITL workflows.
• BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Serve as hands-on tech lead for Safety Foundation, setting direction and driving execution.
• Lead the design of a scalable, cost-efficient platform for 10x traffic growth.
• Drive AI-first transformation with agentic/ML workflows, ensuring security, auditability, and reliability.
• Build developer experience to enable Roblox product teams to integrate safety in hours.
• Partner with safety and product teams to translate needs into durable infra.
• Define backend standards and provide architecture guidance and mentorship.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, data, and compute.

Skills

Go

Backend systems

Distributed systems

NoSQL databases

AI/ML integration

Developer platform

CQRS

Event Sourcing

Education

BS in CS/Engineering or related field

Job description

Safety Foundation is the infrastructure backbone that powers safety across Roblox. Every piece of content reviewed, every moderation action, and every safety workflow on the platform flows through systems built by this team, which other safety teams build on. The team is scaling to handle 10x more traffic while keeping cost growth in check, rebuilding the platform to be AI-first with native support for agentic and ML-driven safety workflows, and cutting the time to integrate safety capabilities from months to hours. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers: setting technical direction, owning architecture decisions, and staying deeply engaged in the work. Your decisions will shape how safety works across all of Roblox.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers on Safety Foundation, setting technical direction, driving execution, and staying close to the code
• Lead the design and implementation of a scalable, cost-efficient platform built for 10x traffic growth
• Drive the AI-first transformation of the safety platform, architecting agentic and ML-integrated workflows with the security, auditability, and reliability production safety systems require
• Build the developer experience layer that lets product teams across Roblox integrate safety capabilities in hours, not months
• Partner with Trust & Safety ML, User Safety, Safety Operations, and product teams to turn platform needs into durable infrastructure
• Define backend standards and patterns across the team, and raise the technical bar through code review, architecture guidance, and mentorship
• Find and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, data, and compute at scale

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale backend and distributed systems and shipping high-quality systems to production (a strong preference for experience building developer platforms)
• 4+ years acting as a tech lead: setting direction, driving execution, and growing engineers at multiple levels
• Deep proficiency in Go or a similar compiled language (Go strongly preferred)
• Experience with NoSQL databases at scale (DynamoDB, Cassandra, or similar)
• Experience with, or strong interest in, AI/ML platform integration, such as pipelines, agentic workflows, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows
• BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience

Skills

Technical Skills

• Go (or a similar compiled language)
• Large-scale backend and distributed systems
• NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, Cassandra)
• AI/ML platform integration and agentic workflows
• Developer platform design
• CQRS and Event Sourcing (a plus)

Soft Skills

• Hands-on technical leadership
• Platform thinking, designing for reuse, velocity, and reliability
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Mentoring and multiplying the team’s impact

Nice to Have

• Experience with CQRS and Event Sourcing

Benefits

• Equity compensation for all full-time employees
• Benefits for full-time employees, with details on Roblox’s careers page