Principal Software Engineer, Core Services
Roblox · San Mateo, United States · 12h 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.
Core Services builds the foundational services and software infrastructure behind Roblox’s global platform. Our work includes the C#/.NET and Rust frameworks, shared libraries, and runtime integrations that engineers use to build and operate production services.
As a Principal Software Engineer on the Core Services team you will solve problems spanning distributed systems, concurrency, memory management, API design, and developer experience. You will improve the performance and reliability of our C# ecosystem, expand our Rust infrastructure, and develop shared components and interoperability patterns across both languages. Your work will help teams adopt better foundations safely, with improvements that compound across Roblox’s service fleet.
This role combines hands-on systems engineering with technical leadership. You will work with service owners and infrastructure partners to turn complex platform capabilities into reliable, usable building blocks, and own their evolution from design through production adoption.
You Will
- Build and evolve shared C#/.NET and Rust frameworks, libraries, and SDKs, including HTTP/gRPC infrastructure, caching, configuration, and observability.
- Investigate performance from application code through the runtime: allocation pressure, garbage collection, lock contention, asynchronous execution, serialization, and network overhead.
- Design safe, efficient managed/native interoperability with explicit ownership, error handling, cancellation, and compatibility contracts.
- Create stable, usable APIs and lead their evolution across teams, balancing extensibility, performance, operational safety, and maintenance cost.
- Build automation for framework upgrades and service migrations, including AI-assisted workflows supported by compatibility tests, benchmarks, traffic replay, and canary evidence.
- Partner with deployment and service teams to make library changes easier to adopt, detect regressions early, and support safe rollout and rollback.
- Lead ambiguous technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and measure outcomes in reliability, resource efficiency, adoption, and developer productivity.
You have
- Deep production experience in C#/.NET or Rust, with the ability and interest to work effectively across both ecosystems.
- Experience building and evolving reusable libraries, SDKs, frameworks, or runtime infrastructure adopted by multiple teams.
- Strong fundamentals in concurrency, asynchronous programming, memory management, networking, and distributed systems.
- A track record of diagnosing complex production problems and delivering measurable performance or reliability improvements.
- Experience designing stable APIs and managing compatibility, versioning, dependencies, and adoption across dependent systems.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: framing ambiguous problems, explaining tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team execution.
- A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Particularly valuable experience
- .NET runtime internals, GC and allocation optimization, thread-pool behavior, or production profiling.
- Rust ownership and lifetimes, async runtimes, concurrent data structures, or performance-sensitive library design.
- Managed/native interoperability, FFI, native memory diagnostics, or cross-platform packaging.
- Contract-driven code generation, serialization, compatibility testing, or large-scale framework migrations.
- Automated validation and rollout of shared dependencies across a service fleet.
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.