Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement new engine features—indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements—that push latency, throughput, and availability boundaries.
• Evolve the control plane to deliver elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema or tenant moves across global regions.
• Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling; drive systematic tail-latency reductions.
• Establish engineering best practices by leading design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives.
• Automate testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling frameworks to enable hands-off operation at scale.
• Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering deep database craftsmanship and sharing knowledge across teams.
• Engage with the open-source community—upstreaming patches, presenting learnings, and influencing the future of Postgres, RocksDB, and related ecosystems.

Requirements

• 8+ 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, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB).
• Deep expertise in database internals—B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management—and strong skills in C/C++, GO or Rust.
• Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver strong consistency and high availability.
• Proven success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability.
• Ability to translate ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making to improve reliability and efficiency.

Nice to Have

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

Qualifications

• Educational background or certifications are not explicitly specified but implied to be relevant to senior software engineering roles.

Benefits & Perks

• Annual salary range of $289,460—$338,270 USD, dependent on experience and other factors.
• Eligibility for equity compensation and benefits.
• In-office work at the San Mateo, CA headquarters on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional in-office days on Monday and Friday.