Senior Software Engineer, Service Mesh San Mateo, CA, United States Engineering

Roblox Corporation; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 197,000 - 243,000; Full time

Job summary

Roblox Corporation seeks a seasoned distributed systems engineer to design and operate the service mesh across its hybrid Kubernetes/Nomad environment, enabling secure, scalable communications for billions of daily requests.

You will drive Istio/Envoy integration, ensure mTLS and traffic policies, and collaborate with multiple internal teams to provide a frictionless Paved Road for developers. A strong background in Go, C/C++, or Rust is essential.

Qualifications

• Experience designing large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple clusters and regions.
• Strong knowledge of service mesh concepts: traffic management, mTLS, observability, routing policies.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and xDS-based control planes.
• Proficiency in Go, C/C++, or Rust for networking components.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the service mesh infrastructure across Roblox’s hybrid Kubernetes and Nomad environments.
• Drive integration of service mesh with Kubernetes, including sidecar injection and traffic policies.
• Support Cloud Bursting networking and multi-cluster routing across regions.
• Mentor engineers and promote testing and reliability best practices.
• Troubleshoot Envoy sidecars, Istio control plane, and underlying network stack.

Skills

Distributed systems

Service mesh technologies (Istio/Envoy

Kubernetes in production

Envoy proxy internals

xDS APIs

Go

C/C++

Rust

Tools

Istio

Envoy

Consul

Linkerd

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.

Who We Are:

Roblox is reimagining the way people come together to connect, create, and express themselves. To support our massive scale, we are powered by thousands of microservices. The Application Networking team connects and secures these services, building ingress gateways, managing the service mesh, and enabling seamless communication across Roblox’s hybrid on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

We are executing on Cloud Bursting, a strategic initiative to enable Roblox’s core services to transparently burst from on-prem data centers to the cloud, allowing us to handle historical peak concurrent players and survive regional failures. You will join our Service Mesh team to build the networking fabric that makes this possible.

You Will:

• Design and build the service mesh infrastructure that enables communication across Roblox’s hybrid Kubernetes and Nomad environments, supporting billions of daily requests.
• Drive the integration of service mesh with Kubernetes, ensuring reliable sidecar injection, mTLS, traffic policies, and observability for production workloads.
• Build the networking foundation for Cloud Bursting, enabling Roblox’s top services to transparently burst from on-prem data centers to the cloud, with service discovery, traffic management, and locality-aware routing across environments.
• Partner with internal application teams to understand their connectivity pain points, ensuring the service mesh provides a frictionless 'paved road' for thousands of developers
• Collaborate with the Gateway and CNI teams to deliver a unified, multi-cluster service fabric that abstracts cluster and regional boundaries from application developers.
• Serve as a primary escalation point for complex service mesh issues, troubleshooting across Envoy sidecars, Istio control plane, and the underlying network stack.
• Act as a senior voice on the team, mentoring junior engineers and promoting best practices in testing, deployment, and reliability engineering.

You Are:

• A professional with 3+ years of experience in distributed systems, with strong expertise in service mesh technologies (Istio, Envoy, Consul, or Linkerd). You understand the tradeoffs of sidecar-based architectures at scale.
• Deeply knowledgeable of service mesh concepts: traffic management, service discovery, mTLS, observability, and routing policies.
• Experienced running Kubernetes in production and familiar with the K8s networking model.
• Comfortable working with Envoy proxy internals, xDS APIs, and control plane architectures.
• Excellent at designing large-scale distributed systems that span multiple clusters, regions, and runtime environments.
• Fluent in Go, C/C++, or Rust.
• Experienced with on-call rotations and approach infrastructure with a “reliability-first” mindset.

Annual Salary Range

$196,750 — $243,290 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.