Principal Data Engineer

Who you are

• 8+ years of experience as a product-focused data systems engineer (preferably working with search, recommendation, advertising or personalization systems)
• Experience designing efficient logging schemas and optimizing data processing pipelines
• Experience with real-time stream processing and batch processing (using technologies such as Flink, Spark, Kafka, Druid)
• Familiarity with feature stores and other machine learning infrastructure
• A Technical Leader: You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical solutions. Your technical expertise influences product direction. You nurture a culture of technical excellence
• Versatile: You're a generalist and you are comfortable with several languages and technologies already; you are adaptable in any situation. You are resourceful, and take a creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems
• Analytical: Excited to investigate large, ambiguous problems, and quantify the problems and the solutions
• User Oriented: You always start with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users or internal engineers before architecting a solution
• Team Oriented: You lift up your peers and find ways to make the team stronger

What the job involves

• The Economy ML team is building the machine learning backbone that powers Roblox’s Marketplace, Developer Monetization, and Payments ecosystems
• From intelligent pricing and personalized storefronts to dynamic layout optimization and avatar understanding, we’re reimagining how the Roblox economy drives user engagement, monetization, and creator success at scale
• As a Principal Software Engineer (Data Systems), you will architect, build and deploy high-scale, reliable real-time and batch data systems for personalization, search and recommendation across various product surfaces in Marketplace, Developer Monetization and Payments
• You will be involved in key data projects from architecting event taxonomies and logging interfaces to real-time feature serving across multiple search and recommendation surfaces
• Act as data engineering lead for Economy ML, setting standards for batch vs streaming feature pipelines, table design, observability, and documentation used across the Economy group
• Work as a hands-on contributor on our data systems to power content recommendation, search and personalization across Economy product surfaces
• Partner with Product, Data Science and ML engineering counterparts to prioritize data initiatives that unlock top-line business goals and reduce tech debt in existing datasets and pipelines
• Mentor other DE/ML engineers on best practices for schema design, client logging, experimentation data, and feature pipelines, raising the overall bar for data work
• Collaborate with partner and platform teams across Roblox to make sure we are building products with a community first approach
• Research and leverage industry-leading practices while making product impact