Senior Software Engineer - Avatar Defaults

Roblox•San Mateo, CA

11d•$243,290 - $295,250•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. The Avatar Team is at the heart of the Roblox experience. We build and evolve the systems that define how every player shows up in the largest gaming platform in the world — from how avatars look and move, to how they express themselves and interact with the world. Our work sits at the intersection of engine technology, animation, safety, and creator tools, and it has to scale to hundreds of millions of players across millions of experiences. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Avatar Default Abilities team, you will own the technical design and implementation of a growing library of high-quality default abilities for the platform avatar. You will be joining a newly forming team tasked with implementing the default verbs for the next era of Roblox where developers will be able to build any game or level of quality they want. The problem our team is trying to solve is to keep the feel of Roblox consistent from experience to experience, but also make it easier for developers to build on top of default abilities to make the kind of games you wouldn’t expect on Roblox, and are an absolute blast to play with friends. Because Roblox is the largest gaming platform in the world, we are introducing best practice examples to the next generation of gamers and devs of how gameplay should feel. For example, we are building example default abilities that define how a player moves and attacks in a metroidvania platformers, visceral shooters, AA stealth parkour games, anything else you can imagine in a life simulator, and beyond. Since our developers continue making up new ways to play, our work will never end. You will take abilities from concept to production, define patterns and abstractions that other teams can build on, and ensure our default abilities feel great, perform well, and work reliably across the full diversity of Roblox experiences and devices.

Requirements

A strong technical foundation, with a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience in the gaming, animation, or software industry.
Advanced expertise in avatar or character animation systems, with hands-on experience building and shipping state-of-the-art runtime animation pipelines. We are expecting this role to bring in domain knowledge of how AA games build their realtime animation pipelines so we can improve the kind of experiences that can be built on Roblox.
Proven software engineering excellence in C++ and a high-level scripting language such as Lua or Python, including experience designing, implementing, and maintaining complex, performance-sensitive systems.
Prior experience working with CG interactive characters — rigging, movement, behaviours and actions — and integrating them into modern game engines, animation systems, and/or large-scale real-time platforms.

Responsibilities

Develop avatar abilities that push the quality bar far beyond what was previously thought possible on the platform, combining state-of-the-art animation techniques with the practical constraints of a massively scaled real-time system.
Design, implement, and ship new default abilities end-to-end - from early prototypes and technical exploration through productionization, rollout, and ongoing iteration.
Build robust, reusable systems on top of the platform avatar and ability manager so that abilities are composable, data-driven, and reliable across millions of experiences and billions of avatar configurations.
Collaborate extensively with world-class designers, animators, engine engineers, and product leadership to translate creative ability concepts into technically sound, performant implementations usable by every player.
Define and uphold engineering best practices for ability development (architecture, documentation, testing, automation, and observability) to keep the abilities library maintainable as it grows.
Profile, optimize, and harden abilities for performance and stability across a wide range of devices, from low-end mobile hardware to high-end PCs and consoles.
Partner with Studio, Engine, and creator-facing teams to ensure abilities are easy for developers to integrate, configure, and extend within their own experiences.
Use qualitative feedback and quantitative signals (e.g., engagement, performance metrics, error reports) to debug complex runtime behaviors and continuously improve the feel, responsiveness, and reliability of abilities.
Mentor other engineers, sharing deep expertise in avatar animation, character systems, and large-scale engine development, and help shape the long-term technical roadmap for default abilities on Roblox.