Director Engineering, Economy ML

Roblox•San Mateo, CA

2d•$399,420 - $457,970•Onsite

About The Position

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. The Economy ML team sits at the center of this mission. We build ML and AI systems that power personalization, search, pricing, recommendations, and virtual item intelligence across Roblox Economy surfaces, including Avatar Marketplace, Payments, Developer Monetization and Subscriptions. As Roblox continues to invest deeply in AI and ML, this organization also plays a key role in advancing next-generation AI capabilities across the company through close partnership with Discovery, Foundation AI, Engine, Creator and product engineering teams. Our work spans both product impact and foundational ML innovation at Roblox scale. We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead and scale Economy ML. This leader will define the strategy, organization, and execution model for a fast-growing ML organization spanning recommendation systems, ML infrastructure, search, content intelligence, and Generative AI applications.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant leadership experience managing engineering organizations.
Experience leading teams focused on machine learning, recommendation systems, search, ranking, or large-scale distributed systems.
Strong technical depth in ML systems, infrastructure, and modern machine learning architectures.
Experience with recommendation systems, marketplace/e-commerce ML, search, or ads systems.
Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, multi-modal models, or foundation model architectures.
Experience operating at large scale, including high-throughput inference systems, distributed training, or real-time personalization platforms.
Proven ability to drive cross-functional initiatives across multiple teams and organizations.
Strong product and business intuition with a track record of delivering measurable impact.
Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent and leaders.

Responsibilities

Define and lead the long-term strategy for Economy ML across core modeling, recommendations, search, pricing, content intelligence, and ML systems.
Build and scale a high-performing ML engineering organization, including managers and senior ICs.
Partner across teams to help advance shared AI technologies, infrastructure, and modeling capabilities that power experiences throughout Roblox.
Lead investments in next-generation ML systems, including large-scale recommendation models, foundation models, semantic retrieval, and Generative AI workflows.
Establish scalable ML development practices across experimentation, feature engineering, model serving, training infrastructure, and evaluation.
Drive adoption of modern ML architectures including transformers, multi-task learning, retrieval systems, and multi-modal modeling.
Partner with senior leadership to align technical investments with long-term business strategy and company priorities.
Mentor engineering leaders and cultivate a strong technical and execution culture across the organization.
Balance innovation and execution across both near-term product impact and long-term platform investments.