Principal Software Engineer - Roblox Database

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 principal 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.

You will:

• Design and implement new engine features\u2014indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements\u2014that 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\u2014upstreaming patches, presenting learnings, and influencing the future of Postgres, RocksDB and related ecosystems.

You have:

• 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\u2014B-trees, MVCC, WAL, query optimization, buffer management\u2014and 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 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.
• Bonus: upstream contributions to PostgreSQL, RocksDB or other OSS databases; familiarity with disaggregated storage, HTAP workloads, or custom query languages.