Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Reliability

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 Reliability?

Roblox serves over 100 million people every day across a platform that is constantly evolving — and behind every experience is infrastructure that has to work, every time, at massive scale.  The Reliability team at Roblox operates at the depth and breadth of the Roblox stack.  Availability of the platform is a key company goal.  We are hiring our first Principal Machine Learning engineer within our team.  

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer within Reliability, you will set the 3-5 year technical strategy and architectural blueprint for how machine learning systems/practices can be leveraged to improve the reliability of the overall Roblox platform.  You will own the architectural and execution roadmap of leveraging massive data across  - logs, traces, metrics, production changes, to proactively detect issues before they become real problems (MTTD) and/or reduce time to resolve incidents (MTTR).  You will have the opportunity to cross functionally collaborate with other similar teams at Roblox to define best practices and software.

You will:

• Define and Own the Technical Vision: Define and lead the multi-year technical vision, architectural strategy, and execution for machine learning solutions in Content Safety, ensuring these systems proactively and effectively detect and mitigate violative content at massive scale.
• Strategic Stakeholder Partnership: Collaborate with executive-level Product, Data Science, Policy, and Operations leaders to define and prioritize the strategic machine learning roadmap, influencing product strategy and demonstrating the impact of ML on user trust and safety outcomes.
• Lead Innovation: Oversee the adoption and safe deployment of innovative machine learning techniques (e.g., transfer-learning, self-supervised learning, quantization, LoRA, distillation).
• Drive End-to-End Product Development: You will not just model; you will build. You will work cross-functionally to construct datasets from scratch where none exist, build auto-labeling pipelines, and ship solutions to solve novel technical problems.
• Ship Code, Not Just Models: Expect to spend roughly 30-40% of your time on backend and integration work. You will be responsible for integrating your work into the production stack, leveraging modern AI coding tools (e.g., Cursor) to accelerate velocity and handle infrastructure complexity

You have:

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and operating large-scale, high-impact machine learning systems in a production environment.
• A proven track record of successfully setting the long-term technical direction for an entire ML domain, demonstrating the ability to take ambiguous problems from concept to scaled production impact.
• Deep expertise in advanced ML architectures and techniques, including Computer Vision (CV) and/or Vision-Language Models (VLMs)
• Expertise in architecting scalable, real-time ML inference services and robust data pipelines
• Demonstrated success in leading and resolving high-stakes, cross-functional conflicts and technical disagreements, with an ability to build consensus among diverse stakeholders.
• Exceptional product sense and strategic planning ability: able to translate platform safety requirements into an achievable, iterative technical roadmap.

You are:

• A Visionary Architect: Capable of synthesizing complex business and safety goals into a clear, compelling, and actionable technical strategy.
• A Pragmatic Builder: You are scrappy and impact-oriented. You view undefined data and messy systems as opportunities to build structure rather than blockers to progress.
• Comfortable with Ambiguity: You thrive in undefined or open-ended problem spaces, providing structure, clarity, and decisive direction to your teams.
• An Inspiring Leader: Passionate about developing the next generation of technical leaders, managers, and engineers.
• An Executive Communicator: Highly effective at communicating complex technical concepts to both engineering teams and non-technical executive leadership.
• Committed to Ethical AI: Dedicated to building ML systems that are fair, transparent, and operate with the utmost responsibility toward user safety and platform civility.

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 employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.