Distinguished Engineer, Machine Learning - Economy

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. At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower a global community of creators and developers to build immersive experiences and a dynamic virtual economy. Our Economy ML team sits at the heart of this mission, delivering scalable machine learning systems that power personalization, pricing, search, and content understanding across all Economy surfaces: Marketplace, Developer Monetization, Payments, and Avatar. We’re looking for a Distinguished Engineer/Technical Director to lead the strategy and technical direction for ML systems, with a focus on large-scale recommendations, infrastructure, and emerging Generative AI applications. You’ll help build the systems that support retrieval, ranking, generative modeling, and LLM-powered personalization, all at massive scale. This role requires deep systems thinking, hands-on ML expertise, and a vision for how traditional ML and GenAI come together to power the future of the Roblox economy. Why Roblox for ML Systems • AI/ML is a top company priority, with long-term investment. • Real-world scale: Power millions of daily economic interactions across ranking, pricing, fraud, and search. • Full-system ownership: Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines; from data ingestion to GPU training to live inference. • Complex surfaces, rich signals: Design systems for 3D content, UGC, avatar metadata, behavioral and economic signals, not just text or images. • Impact meets innovation: Shape the future of the Roblox economy while working on frontier ML infra and GenAI workflows. You Will: • Set the technical direction and implementation for the machine learning solutions that power core economy experiences: personalization, ranking, generative modeling, and more. • Author specs for new features and improvements. You would be responsible for setting the AI strategy, pushing the frontier of recommendation technology, and driving business outcomes across candidate generation, ranking, objective functions, and value delivery for both users and developers. • Build and evolve infrastructure for training, serving, and evaluating both traditional ML models and Generative AI models (e.g., embedding-based retrieval, transformers, LLM-based workflows) • You will co-design models and systems, working at the intersection of model architecture and infrastructure, partnering closely with core modelers, data and AI infrastructure engineers, and product teams to push the boundaries of large-scale training and serving. • Lead other engineers by example and through technical direction as an individual contributor and create an engineering culture of excellence • Become an authority on our technology stack and make sure we always build new solutions the right way • Collaborate with other teams within Roblox to make sure we are building products with community and company first attitude. • Balance researching new technologies with a practical approach to realize the research efforts into the Roblox products • Collaborate with the industry and communities where applicable and be ambassador for Roblox. You Have: • 10+ years of experience and a consistent record of delivering and improving large-scale search and recommendation systems. • Experience building and improving large scale machine learning models with billions of parameters and launching them into production. You have made substantial contributions to ML infrastructure and production systems. • The capability of breaking down long-term product requirements into iterative deliverable stages. • Initiated and facilitated challenging technical decisions across multiple teams and organizations. You are empathetic and find common understanding. • You always start with the first principles and the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users and creators or internal engineers. • A generalist approach and you have mastered several languages and technologies already; you can easily adapt to any situation. • The ability to roll up your sleeves to tackle data problems or machine learning problems when they come up. • A creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems. You simplify the complex. You bring in fresh ideas from new places. • BS in Computer Science or a related discipline, MS/PhD are a definite plus. 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. Annual Salary Range $397,460—$455,720 USD 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 ty