Principal Software Engineer, Metrics Platform

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. Roblox’s data infrastructure powers analytics, machine learning, and product decisions across a platform serving more than 200 million daily active users. As a Principal Software Engineer in Data Infra, you will set the technical direction for a metrics platform that helps teams define trusted metrics, discover and govern them, and use them consistently across analytics and data-processing systems. You will lead architecture and execution for a platform that connects metric definitions to their materializations and consumers, including Spark, Flink, OLAP systems, and feature platforms. This role requires both deep technical judgment and organizational influence: you will align teams around durable interfaces and semantics, guide major cross-team initiatives, and help Roblox evolve how it builds and uses metrics at scale. You Will: • Set the technical vision: Define the long-term architecture and evolution of the metrics platform, including metric registration, discovery, versioning, ownership, dependencies, and governance. • Establish shared semantics: Design the contracts and standards that let analytics and compute systems consume metric definitions consistently, without coupling those definitions to one execution engine. • Connect definitions to data: Guide the architecture for turning logical metric definitions into physical materializations and serving locations across Spark, Flink, OLAP, and feature platforms. • Lead cross-team initiatives: Build alignment across Data Infra, data engineering, analytics, and ML teams; resolve architectural boundaries and dependencies; and drive adoption of shared platform capabilities. • Raise reliability and efficiency: Set expectations for scalability, observability, resilience, data correctness, and operational ownership across the metric lifecycle. • Develop technical leaders: Mentor engineers, improve technical decision-making across teams, and create leverage through reusable designs, APIs, and engineering practices. • Shape platform interaction: Explore self-service and agent-assisted workflows for metric discovery and use, with appropriate validation and governance. • Agentic Interface: Embed AI/ML capabilities within our data platform, leveraging LLMs for data discovery and generation, building autonomous, self-serve mechanisms for platform interaction layer. You Have: • B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience. • 10+ years of experience building, designing, testing and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems. • Extensive experience designing and delivering production-grade distributed systems or data platforms. • A record of setting technical direction for systems that span multiple teams or product areas. • Deep experience in one or more areas such as data platforms, metadata and catalog systems, semantic layers, analytical systems, or large-scale data processing. • Strong engineering skills in Java, Go, Scala, or Python, and experience designing reliable services and APIs. • Strong understanding of SQL and familiarity with systems such as Spark, Flink, Trino, Druid, or comparable technologies. • Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous, cross-team problems into an architecture and execution plan that teams can adopt. • Excellent technical communication and influence: you can build alignment, explain tradeoffs, and guide decisions without relying on direct authority. • Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: A proven track record of influencing technical direction across a large engineering organization, leading consensus on complex architectural initiatives, and championing successful multi-quarter projects. • Extreme Ownership: A history of radical accountability. You do not wait for clean specifications in high-ambiguity environments; you actively define the technical requirements, unblock dependencies, rally engineers across pods, and steer complex projects from initial whiteboard sketch all the way to production stability. Nice to Have: • Experience building metric or semantic platforms, data catalogs, lineage systems, or data governance capabilities. • Experience making metric definitions usable across multiple query or compute engines. • Contributions to open-source data infrastructure projects. • Experience operating data infrastructure at consumer-internet scale. 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 $295,250—$345,040 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 employme