Senior Security Software Engineer, Sandbox Platforms
Roblox · San Mateo, United States · 9d ago
Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.
At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device.We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
About the role
We build the isolation layers that contain untrusted and semi-trusted code. You will design, build, and harden process sandboxes across one or more of Linux, macOS, and Windows, the last line of defense when something inside goes wrong. This is a deep systems role for someone who thinks in terms of attack surface, threat models, and the exact boundary between trusted and untrusted.
You Will:
- Design and implement sandboxes using platform primitives: nsjail, seccomp-bpf, namespaces, cgroups, and Landlock on Linux; the Seatbelt (sandbox_init / SBPL) and related mechanisms on macOS; AppContainer, job objects, restricted tokens, and integrity levels on Windows.
- Define and lock down every communication path in and out of the sandbox: syscalls, IPC, shared memory, file descriptors, sockets, brokers, and minimize what each one exposes.
- Enumerate and reduce attack surface: kernel syscall surface, broker interfaces, device access, and side channels. Assume the code inside is hostile.
- Make deliberate engineering tradeoffs between isolation strength, performance, compatibility, and maintainability, and document the reasoning.
- Write threat models, review designs, and respond to sandbox escapes and hardening findings.
You Have:
- Deep, hands-on knowledge of the OS security model on at least one of Linux, macOS, or Windows, and the sandboxing primitives that platform provides.
- Strong grasp of attack surface analysis: how sandboxes are escaped and how to shrink the ways in.
- Fluency in the boundary between sandbox and host (brokers, IPC, syscall filtering, privilege separation) and how to design a minimal, well-audited interface.
- Systems programming in C, C++, or Rust; comfort at the syscall and kernel-interface level.
- Sound judgment on tradeoffs: knowing when tighter isolation is worth the cost and when it isn't.
- A security mindset: you default to least privilege and distrust every input crossing the boundary.
Nice to have
- Experience across more than one of the three platforms.
- Kernel, hypervisor, or low-level OS internals work.
- Fuzzing, exploit development, or red-team experience against isolation boundaries.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.
For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.