Principal Software Engineer, Safety Foundation

Roblox•San Mateo, CA

1d•$295,250 - $345,040•Hybrid

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. Why Safety? At Roblox, we strive to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and the Safety organization’s mission is to become the leader in civil immersive online communities. We systematically detect, remove, and prevent problematic content and behavior, and we make Roblox accounts secure and free from compromise. We cover a broad area of the tech spectrum, including machine learning, classifiers for 3D models, experimentation, automation, detection workflows, and AI-powered text filters. Aligned and partnering with product teams, we use this toolbelt to discover new opportunities, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build safety products, and measure the impact on our community of users and developers. In doing so, we keep Roblox safe, civil, and inclusive, and we foster positive relationships between people around the world. Why Safety Foundation? Safety Foundation is the infrastructure backbone that powers safety across Roblox. Every piece of content reviewed, every moderation action taken, every safety workflow running anywhere on the platform flows through systems built by this team. We are the platform that other safety teams build on — and right now, we're in the middle of one of the most significant evolutions in our history. We're scaling to handle 10x more traffic while keeping cost growth in check. We're rebuilding the platform to be AI-first, natively supporting agentic and ML-driven safety workflows without compromising on security or auditability. And we're radically improving developer velocity — cutting the time it takes any team to integrate safety capabilities from months to hours. As a Principal Software Engineer on Safety Foundation, you'll be the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers on the team. You'll set technical direction, own architecture decisions, and stay deeply engaged in the work. Your decisions will shape how safety works across all of Roblox — for over 100+ daily monthly active users.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building large-scale backend/distributed systems and shipping high-quality systems to production. Strong preference for candidates who have experience with building developer platforms.
4+ years acting as a tech lead: setting direction, driving execution, and growing engineers at multiple levels
Deep proficiency in Go or a similar compiled language (Go strongly preferred). Experience with CQRS & Event Sourcing is a plus
Experience with NoSQL databases at scale (DynamoDB, Cassandra, or similar)
Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML platform integration — pipelines, agentic workflows, HITL workflows or similar
BA/BS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent experience

Nice To Haves

Experience with building developer platforms
Experience with CQRS & Event Sourcing
Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML platform integration — pipelines, agentic workflows, HITL workflows or similar

Responsibilities

Serve as the hands-on tech lead for a group of engineers on the Safety Foundation team — setting technical direction, driving execution, and staying close to the code
Lead the design and implementation of a scalable, cost-efficient platform engineered for 10x traffic growth
Drive the AI-first transformation of the safety platform: architecting agentic and ML-integrated workflows with the security, auditability, and reliability that production safety systems require
Build the developer experience layer that enables product teams across Roblox to integrate safety capabilities in hours, not months
Partner closely with Trust & Safety ML, User Safety, Safety Operations, and product teams to translate platform needs into durable infrastructure
Define backend standards and patterns across the team; raise the technical bar through code review, architecture guidance, and mentorship
Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, data, and compute — at scale