Principal Software Engineer, Economy ML (Backend)
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 Economy ML team is building the machine learning backbone that powers Roblox’s Marketplace, Developer Monetization, and Payments ecosystems. From intelligent pricing and personalized storefronts to dynamic layout optimization and avatar understanding, we’re reimagining how the Roblox economy drives user engagement, monetization, and creator success at scale.
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will architect, build and deploy high-scale, reliable backend and data systems for personalization, search and recommendation across various product surfaces in Marketplace, Developer Monetization and Payments. You will be involved in key projects such serving heterogeneous content recommendation for whole page construction, making our real-time feature serving more flexible and reliable, enabling exploration and multi-armed bandit learning, and scaling our systems to support a very large corpus.
You Will
- Design and build the systems that powers content recommendation, search and personalization across Economy product surfaces.
- Lead the implementation of our backend and data infrastructure and mentor the Economy ML backend engineering team.
- Collaborate with partner and platform teams across Roblox to make sure we are building products with a community first approach.
- Research and leverage industry-leading practices while making product impact.
You Have
- 8+ years of experience as a backend engineer in search, recommendation, advertising or personalization systems.
- Experience in building and scaling high-scale distributed systems.
- Experience with real-time stream processing, feature stores and other machine learning infrastructure (exposure to GPU inferencing and deep learning frameworks is a big plus).
- Ability to design and architect systems for personalization and related domains.
You Are
- A Technical Leader: You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical solutions. Your technical expertise influences product direction. You nurture a culture of technical excellence.
- Versatile: You're a generalist and you are comfortable with several languages and technologies already; you are adaptable in any situation. You are resourceful, and take a creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems.
- Analytical: Excited to investigate large, ambiguous problems, and quantify the problems and the solutions.
- User Oriented: You always start with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users or internal engineers before architecting a solution.
- Team Oriented: You lift up your peers and find ways to make the team stronger.
Why Economy ML @ Roblox?
- Cross-surface impact: Your work will influence virtual item recommendations, Robux pricing, page layout, avatar generation, and more.
- Scalable infrastructure: Build on top of Roblox’s ML Platform to accelerate experimentation and deployment.
- High-leverage mission: Directly contribute to key growth levers: retention, engagement, monetization, and creator success.
- Flexible structure: Work in a fluid pod model, allocating effort to the most strategic initiatives without rigid silos.
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.
Roles that are based in our San Mateo, CA Headquarters are in-office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional in-office 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 for all candidates during the interview process.
