Senior Software Engineer - Traffic Proxy

Roblox; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 243,000 - 295,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Benefits described on page

Job summary

Roblox is hiring a senior systems engineer to build high-performance edge services in production. You’ll work on memory-safe Rust services, Kubernetes deployments, and network proxies to handle billions of requests. You’ll own design docs and collaborate across Security, Reliability, and Compute teams.

The role emphasizes building reliable, scalable infrastructure with on-call responsibility and opportunities to leverage AI tools for faster research and troubleshooting.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and operating backend or infrastructure software.
• Fluent in a systems language; Rust preferred, Go acceptable.
• Strong knowledge of TCP, TLS, HTTP/1.1/1.0, QUIC, and production L7 proxies.
• Familiar with kernel/userspace interactions and kernel tuning for performance.
• Experience with kernel-bypass and eBPF/XDP.
• End-to-end capability with Kubernetes and node-level reasoning.
• Ability to write design docs for senior stakeholders and disagree constructively.
• Motivation to work on high-risk, fast feedback systems.
• Curiosity to explore stack internals to understand behavior.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance services in the request data path.
• Leverage AI tools to speed up R&D and troubleshooting.
• Evolve edge architecture toward simpler, programmable systems with safe rollbacks.
• Improve traffic classification and mitigate DDoS and abuse traffic.
• Build automated feedback loops to reduce MTTR.
• Own production work and contribute to on-call reliability.

Skills

Systems engineering

Rust

Go

Networking fundamentals

Kernel tuning

eBPF/XDP

Kubernetes

Design docs

On-call mindset

Curiosity

Tools

HAProxy

Envoy

NGINX

Pingora

Kubernetes

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.

The Traffic Proxy Services team powers the front line of Roblox — operating the global edge network and high-performance Layer 7 proxies that handle billions of web and API requests daily while defending the platform against large-scale automated attacks. In this role, you'll help pioneer the next generation of our edge infrastructure: replacing legacy proxy configurations with programmable, memory-safe Rust services running on Kubernetes, and building intelligent, automated defense systems. Working alongside principal engineers and key partners across Security, Reliability, and Platform teams, you'll tackle high-stakes systems challenges where efficiency, scale, and uptime are critical.

You Are:

• An experienced systems engineer with 7+ years building and operating backend or infrastructure software, including time owning a tier-0 service in production.
• Fluent in a systems language. Rust strongly preferred; strong Go experience with the appetite to work in Rust is welcome.
• Deeply comfortable with networking fundamentals: TCP, TLS, HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, QUIC and the internals of at least one production L7 proxy (HAProxy, Envoy, NGINX, Pingora or similar). Able to troubleshoot a live network problem.
• Familiar with how the kernel and userspace interact, and comfortable tuning the kernel to optimize for efficiency and reliability.
• Experienced with high-performance packet processing in and around the kernel — kernel-bypass and kernel-path techniques such as eBPF/XDP.
• Able to independently design, build, and operate systems on Kubernetes end to end, and to reason about node-level behavior when latency and resource isolation matter.
• Able to write a design doc that survives review by senior stakeholders across several teams, and to disagree productively when it doesn't.
• Motivated by problems where the blast radius is real and the feedback loop is immediate.
• Genuinely curious. You pull on the thread until you understand why a system behaves the way it does, and you would rather learn an unfamiliar layer of the stack than route around it.

You Will:

• Design and build high-performance services that sit directly in the request data path, where performance, reliability, and security are of utmost priority.
• Effectively leverage AI tools to speed up research, development, and troubleshooting while keeping a critical eye
• Evolve our edge architecture toward something simpler and programmable, migrating policy incrementally with parity testing and exercised rollback.
• Improve traffic classification and intelligence to detect and mitigate DDoS and abuse traffic.
• Build feedback loops that automate mitigation and reduce MTTR.
• Raise the efficiency of the edge
• Own your work in production as part of the team's on-call rotation, and raise the reliability bar through design, code review, incident review.
• Collaborate across Networking, Security, Reliability, and Compute to deliver on Infrastructure and company priorities.
• Be a gatekeeper for a high code quality bar, architectural designs, and pragmatic vs. long-term approaches.
• Uphold our company vision by putting the Roblox community first and exemplifying our values.

For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.

Annual Salary Range

$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.