Senior Software Engineer (Backend), Communications

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 243,290 - 295,250; Full time

Job summary

Roblox is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Communications, to enhance user communication experiences on the platform. You will architect systems that handle millions of concurrent users while ensuring reliability and developer flexibility.

This role requires strong backend development skills and experience with large-scale systems. Candidates should possess a Bachelor's in Computer Science or equivalent, with 7+ years in the industry.

Competitive salary range is $243,290 to $295,250 along with equity compensation and benefits.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive results.
• Strong skills in multi-threading and memory management.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale backend systems supporting millions of users.
• Optimize systems for communication across the platform.
• Test and iterate on engineering processes for efficiency.

Skills

Backend software development

Proficient in database technology (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL)

Distributed services experience

Networking protocols (HTTP, UDP, GRPC, WebSockets)

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Tools

C++

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 Senior Software Engineer, Communications, you’ll be in charge of building rich, immersive and engaging user communication experiences to empower safe and seamless ways for people and our creators to express themselves in different modalities better than in real life with rich text, at scale in both 2D and 3D space.

This role will focus on building and scaling the backend systems that power text chat, strengthening the underlying chat infrastructure needed to support reliability, safety, and developer-facing flexibility across existing experiences, while also enabling new innovative products and communication patterns. If you are an experienced developer with a deep understanding of large scale systems and enjoy shaping engineering vision, you’ll be right at home within our highly-skilled and product-driven team.

You will:

• Engineer and scale next-generation infrastructure to accommodate our rapidly expanding user base, maintaining systems capable of supporting millions of concurrent users. You will architect high-throughput backend services, leverage machine learning models, and support rapid product experimentation.
• Innovate on the platform to provide creators the tools they need to build deeply tailored & integrated social experiences
• Devise creative solutions to optimize and scale our systems to support communication for a billion people on the platform.
• Introduce and improve our processes to help us be more effective and efficient.
• Enforce high quality standards while we iterate on feature development.
• Collaborate with other engineering and product teams (Game engine, Creator, Trust & Safety to name a few) at the company to push the boundary of what is possible
• Self-organize and take ownership of projects throughout its full lifecycle.
• Help recruit future talent and mentor engineers for the team

You have:

• Fluent in backend software development
• Proficient in Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL or other database technology at scale
• 7+ years industry experience building and supporting highly available and large-scale distributed fault tolerant services in production environments
• Experienced with low-level operating systems concepts including multi-threading, memory management, networking and storage, performance and scale
• Well-versed in networking protocols (HTTP, UDP, GRPC, WebSockets)
• Hold a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional partners in Product and Data Science to drive meaningful results that align with the team's overarching vision.

You are:

• Responsible: you build systems that work and keep on working reliably. You are thorough in your designs, rigorous in handling potential failure cases, and diligent in automated testing.
• Analytical: Excited to investigate large, ambiguous problems, and quantify the problems and the solutions.
• Creative: You take a creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems and driving new tools/functionality for our end users and game developers
• Team-oriented: You are able to work well as part of a team and know how to collaborate with all participants to develop the best solutions. Able to write clear design specs, mentor junior engineers, and guide projects from beginning to end
• Data-driven focused on quality metrics and monitoring

Bonus:

• Experience building communication products and features.
• Experience with C++
• Experience orchestrating and integrating ML models with product use cases
• 2+ years of experience using big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark and Airflow

Annual Salary Range

All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.

$243,290 — $295,250 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.