Principal Software Engineer - Object Store

Roblox•San Mateo, CA

9d•$295,250 - $345,040•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. Roblox's Object Store team is building the in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform that underpins every large-object workload at Roblox — assets, media, analytics, backups, and machine learning datasets — at exabyte scale, trillions of objects, and terabytes per second of throughput. We build and run it ourselves on bare metal in our own data centers, replacing cloud object storage with a platform we control end to end — down to the hardware. As a principal engineer on the Object Store team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch the capabilities that keep this platform durable, fast, and efficient at global scale, and set the technical direction for where it goes next.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage — object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems — at petabyte scale or beyond.
Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production: data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale. Depth operating these systems matters more here than contributing to their internals.
Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
Deep understanding of durability and replication — erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, blast-radius containment.
Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.

Nice To Haves

Upstream contributions to open-source storage projects
S3 API compatibility at scale
NVMe/HDD tiering
Migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage

Responsibilities

Design and build the object store — S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, multi-tenancy and isolation.
Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
Run the bare-metal fleet at scale — cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, hardware and capacity planning.
Profile and optimize critical data paths; drive down tail latency and cost per byte.
Establish engineering best practices — design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives — targeting 4+ 9s.
Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.