Principal Software Engineer, Service Mesh & Networking

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401k program

Flexible vacation

Roflex policy

Catered lunches at Roblox HQ

Snacks and fully stocked kitchens

Onsite fitness center

CalTrain Go Pass

Job summary

Roblox Corporation is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Service Networking to define the direction of service mesh across our data centers and cloud environments. You will lead design and implementation of reliable, secure, and efficient service-to-service communication using Envoy, Istio, and related technologies.

You will mentor engineers, guide cross-team initiatives, and drive performance, security, and cost‑effective rollout plans in a large-scale distributed system landscape at

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Expertise in service mesh, proxies, application gateways, or related infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, service discovery, traffic management, and secure service communication.
• Strong programming skills in Go, C++, Rust, or another systems language with cross-boundary debugging.
• Experience operating Kubernetes in production and leading migrations or performance improvements.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for service mesh, balancing reliability, security, performance, and cost.
• Design and build control-plane and data-plane capabilities for service discovery, routing, load balancing, and policy enforcement.
• Lead integration across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments with safe rollout plans.
• Partner with Security and application teams to enforce workload identity and mutual TLS in production.
• Improve resource efficiency and operational reliability through testing, observability, and deployment automation.
• Lead decisions, review production code, and mentor senior engineers.

Skills

8+ years distributed systems

Service mesh expertise

Networking fundamentals

Go programming

Kubernetes production experience

Problem-to-direction

Tools

Envoy

Istio

Kubernetes

xDS

Job description

Roblox Corporation is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Service Networking to define the direction of service mesh across our data centers and cloud environments. You will lead design and implementation of reliable, secure, and efficient service-to-service communication using Envoy, Istio, and related technologies.

You will mentor engineers, guide cross-team initiatives, and drive performance, security, and cost‑effective rollout plans in a large-scale distributed system landscape at