Principal Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Roblox's data infrastructure processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a Principal Software Engineer in our Data Infra org, you will be the primary technical leader driving the strategic vision, long-term architecture, and massive scalability of our distributed data platforms that power Roblox. You will own and drive the next-generation architecture of our core platforms, which span Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow and Data Catalog. This role operates under high ambiguity, demanding unparalleled ownership to redefine the limits of infrastructure handling exabyte-scale workloads, and providing a unique opportunity to lead the future evolution of our global data ecosystem.

You Will:

• Define Multi-Year Technical Strategy: Own and drive the end-to-end architectural vision for Roblox's core data platforms spanning Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Airflow, and Data Catalog systems. Turn multi-year company strategies into concrete, production-grade infrastructure blueprints.
• Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner closely with executive leadership, platform governance, data science, and product engineering teams across Roblox to align technical roadmaps with business-critical metrics. Act as a trusted technical advisor, ensuring centralized infrastructure meets strict platform requirements.
• Optimize Performance Engine Internals: Deep-dive into distributed engine internals, complex query planning, state management, serialization efficiency, and advanced memory optimization techniques to maximize throughput and cost-efficiency under peak compute loads.
• Pioneer Autonomous Agentic Interfaces: Spearhead the integration of advanced AI/ML capabilities and large language models (LLMs) within our core data platform to deliver self-serve data discovery, automated metadata generation, and intelligent autonomous interaction layers.
• Cultivate Engineering Excellence: Set the baseline for code quality, architectural standards, and system robustness across the organization. Mentor staff, senior, and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of technical rigor, deep-dive post-incident analyses, and proactive chaos engineering validation.

You Have:

• B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience.
• 8+ years of experience building, designing, testing and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems.
• Data Platform Depth: Expert-level mastery and a deep history of building with foundational data technologies within our tech stack: Kafka, Flink, Spark, Trino, Druid, Hive, Airflow, or advanced Data Catalog / Metadata systems.
• Infrastructure Core Builder: A proven track record of architecting, writing, and deploying core data platform code and distributed systems from the ground up. We are looking for someone who builds the engine rather than someone who just maintains or configures existing setups. You have driven major structural overhauls and 1-to-N platform evolutions at hyper-scale (100M+ active users).
• Strong Engineering Foundations: Robust proficiency in Java, Go, or Scala, with a track record of writing clean, highly performant backend code.
• Cloud Fluency: Proven expertise managing, scaling, and troubleshooting complex stateful and stateless multi-cluster data infrastructure running on top of Kubernetes within AWS or GCP.
• Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: A proven track record of influencing technical direction across a large engineering organization, leading consensus on complex architectural initiatives, and championing successful multi-quarter projects.
• Extreme Ownership: A history of radical accountability. You do not wait for clean specifications in high-ambiguity environments; you actively define the technical requirements, unblock dependencies, rally engineers across pods, and steer complex projects from initial whiteboard sketch all the way to production stability.

Nice to Have:

• Contributions to open-source projects in the data infrastructure ecosystem.
• Experience operating infrastructure at consumer-internet scale (100M+ users).