Principal Software Engineer, Data Tooling

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 Tooling team at Roblox builds the shared tools, frameworks, and developer experiences that make data reliable, discoverable, governable, efficient, and easy to use. Our work spans data quality, lineage, metadata, ownership, observability, lifecycle management, optimization, and self-service workflows that support Data Engineering, Data Science, Experimentation, Machine Learning, and product teams across Roblox.

We are looking for a Principal Technical Lead to lead a team building these highly leveraged capabilities. You will help define the roadmap, grow and develop engineers, establish durable engineering standards, and partner across the company to turn complex data-operability challenges into simple, scalable workflows.

You will balance near-term customer impact with long-term platform foundations. Your team’s work will help users understand the health and cost of their data, discover the right datasets, respond to failures faster, meet quality and lifecycle standards, and safely improve the efficiency of the data platform.

You Will

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of engineers through clear expectations, regular feedback, thoughtful hiring, and meaningful technical and career development.
• Own and execute a roadmap for shared data tooling, including frameworks for data quality, lineage, metadata, ownership, discoverability, observability, lifecycle management, optimization, and self-service.
• Set technical direction for platform capabilities that turn data and operational signals into actionable workflows, dashboards, alerts, recommendations, and automated remediation.
• Improve the developer and user experience for discovering, validating, operating, and governing data products.
• Drive initiatives that reduce operational toil, improve data quality and freshness, shorten incident resolution time, optimize compute and storage cost, and responsibly retire low-value data assets.
• Create alignment across teams by communicating priorities, technical tradeoffs, risks, dependencies, and measurable outcomes clearly.
• Build a culture of ownership, operational excellence, experimentation, and continuous improvement.

You Have

• Experience managing, mentoring, or technically leading engineers, with a demonstrated commitment to developing people and building high-performing teams.
• Experience with data catalogs, lineage systems, data-quality frameworks, observability platforms, or metadata services.
• Familiarity with agentic or AI-assisted workflows for data discovery, analysis, or platform operations.
• Experience building or operating shared platforms and frameworks used by multiple teams—not only one-off datasets or pipelines.
• Experience partnering with Data Science, experimentation, ML, product, or infrastructure teams to translate ambiguous requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Strong product thinking: you can identify high-leverage customer problems, prioritize across competing requests, drive adoption, and measure whether a platform investment is working.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical concepts and tradeoffs to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

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.

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.