Principal Software Engineer, App Performance

About the role

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 Consumer App Performance team is looking for a Principal Software Engineer to spearhead stability and performance improvements. You will work across system-level, cross-platform C++ game engine, and front-end codebase, partnering with teams across the company to identify bad behavior patterns and performance bottlenecks, ship measurable improvements, and prevent regressions over time.

Our team owns the end-to-end performance of Roblox, from speed and responsiveness to efficiency and stability, across all devices and platforms we support: mobile, desktop, and console.

You will

• Drive research of new opportunities, build and execute roadmaps to improve stability and resilience of Roblox across all target platforms
• Design novel solutions to prevent and mitigate crashes, hangs, and other interruptions that hurt user experience.
• Build robust defense mechanisms for early detection of stability anomalies through real-time monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD automation.
• Work with stakeholders across Engineering, Product, and Design to align on priorities, tradeoffs, and rollout plans; ensure performance improvements support the user experience.
• Deliver improvements and guardrails that scale across mobile, desktop, and console, with informed tradeoffs for mobile constraints.

You have

• 10+ years of experience: working with complex client application codebases, proficiency in C++, knowledge of Lua or other scripting languages is a plus.
• Comfort with ambiguity: able to dive into unfamiliar codebases, unblock yourself, and take projects from greenfield/MVP -> production-grade.
• Deep understanding of client platforms: hands-on experience in performance profiling and triaging issues on one or more of mobile or desktop platforms, deep understanding of platform API and best practices to implement performance and robust code.
• Systems thinking: ability to build systems that work and keep on working reliably (measurement, monitoring, regression prevention).

Pay and benefits

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).

For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.