Principal Software Engineer – Roblox Database

Postgres
UNITED STATES
October 30, 2026
Full Time
Apply Now

Job Description

Company: Roblox
Location: San Mateo, CA
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $345,040-$399,420 USD

About the Role

Roblox is building a next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload. As a Principal Engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture and build critical database capabilities to keep services fast, reliable, and efficient at global scale.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Design and implement new engine features, including indexing, storage formats, WAL, and replication protocols.
  • Evolve the control plane to deliver elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema/tenant moves across global regions.
  • Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling to reduce tail-latency.
  • Automate everything, developing frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, and autoscaling.
  • Engage with the open-source community–upstreaming patches and influencing the future of Postgres and related ecosystems.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 12+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field.
  • Deep experience with building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB).
  • Deep expertise in database internals–B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, and buffer management.
  • Strong skills in C/C++, GO, or Rust.
  • Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models.
  • Proven success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on Kubernetes or Nomad.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • Upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB, or other OSS databases.
  • Familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

  • Eligibility for equity compensation and comprehensive benefits.

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.

Related Jobs