Principal Software Engineer, Safety Foundation | Roblox San Mateo
briefedSan Mateo (CA)
Principal Software Engineer, Safety Foundation | Roblox San Mateo
Posted yesterday
briefedSan Mateo (CA)
SENIORITY
Manager
About the role
Safety Foundation is the infrastructure backbone that powers safety across Roblox. Every piece of content reviewed, every moderation action, and every safety workflow on the platform flows through systems built by this team, which other safety teams build on. The team is scaling to handle 10x more traffic while keeping cost growth in check, rebuilding the platform to be AI-first with native support for agentic and ML-driven safety workflows, and cutting the time to integrate safety capabilities from months to hours. As a Principal Software Engineer, you will be the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers: setting technical direction, owning architecture decisions, and staying deeply engaged in the work. Your decisions will shape how safety works across all of Roblox.
Key Responsibilities:
- Serve as the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers on Safety Foundation, setting technical direction, driving execution, and staying close to the code
- Lead the design and implementation of a scalable, cost-efficient platform built for 10x traffic growth
- Drive the AI-first transformation of the safety platform, architecting agentic and ML-integrated workflows with the security, auditability, and reliability production safety systems require
- Build the developer experience layer that lets product teams across Roblox integrate safety capabilities in hours, not months
- Partner with Trust & Safety ML, User Safety, Safety Operations, and product teams to turn platform needs into durable infrastructure
- Define backend standards and patterns across the team, and raise the technical bar through code review, architecture guidance, and mentorship
- Find and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, data, and compute at scale
Requirements:
- 10+ years of experience building large-scale backend and distributed systems and shipping high-quality systems to production (a strong preference for experience building developer platforms)4+ years acting as a tech lead: setting direction, driving execution, and growing engineers at multiple levels
- Deep proficiency in Go or a similar compiled language (Go strongly preferred)
- Experience with NoSQL databases at scale (DynamoDB, Cassandra, or similar)
- Experience with, or strong interest in, AI/ML platform integration, such as pipelines, agentic workflows, and human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflowsBA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
- SkillsTechnical SkillsGo (or a similar compiled language)
- Large-scale backend and distributed systems
- NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, Cassandra)AI/ML platform integration and agentic workflows
- Developer platform designCQRS and Event Sourcing (a plus)
- Soft SkillsHands-on technical leadership
- Platform thinking, designing for reuse, velocity, and reliability
- Comfort with ambiguity
- Mentoring and multiplying the team's impact
Nice to Have: Experience with CQRS and Event Sourcing
Benefits:
Equity compensation for all full-time employees Benefits for full-time employees, with details on Roblox's careers page
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