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Senior Software Engineer (Roblox Database)

Roblox

On-siteSan Mateo, CAsenior$243k–$295kPosted 16h ago

Job description

  • Roblox’s database team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload at Roblox

  • As a senior engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch critical database capabilities that keep our services fast, reliable and efficient at global scale. You will report to the Technical Director for Storage

  • 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 everything: develop frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling so that the platform operates hands-off at scale

  • Mentor and unblock engineers, fostering deep database craftsmanship and disseminating knowledge across Storage, Platform, and product teams

  • Engage with the open-source community—upstreaming patches, presenting learnings, and influencing the future of Postgres, RocksDB and related ecosystems- Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages

  • Hands-on experience with consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos) and multi-region replication models that deliver strong consistency and high availability

  • Ability to turn ambiguous product requirements into a clear technical roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders

  • Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decision-making that raises the reliability and efficiency bar

  • Deep experience with building and operating large-scale distributed databases or storage engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL/InnoDB, RocksDB, Spanner, Aurora, AlloyDB)

  • Proven success shipping high-QPS, low-latency services on container orchestration stacks (Kubernetes or Nomad) with comprehensive observability

  • 6+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field

  • Deep expertise in database internals—B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management—and strong skills in C/C++, GO or Rust