Distinguished Engineer, Machine Learning Systems – Economy

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.

At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower a global community

of creators and developers to build immersive experiences and a dynamic virtual

economy. Our Economy ML team sits at the heart of this mission, delivering

scalable machine learning systems that power personalization, pricing, search,

and content understanding across all Economy surfaces: Marketplace, Developer

Monetization, Payments, and Avatar.

We’re looking for a Distinguished Engineer/Technical Director to lead the

strategy and technical direction for ML systems, with a focus on large-scale

recommendations, infrastructure, and emerging Generative AI applications. You’ll

help build the systems that support retrieval, ranking, generative modeling, and

LLM-powered personalization, all at massive scale. This role requires deep

systems thinking, hands-on ML expertise, and a vision for how traditional ML and

GenAI come together to power the future of the Roblox economy.

WHY ROBLOX FOR ML SYSTEMS

* AI/ML is a top company priority, with long-term investment.

* Real-world scale: Power millions of daily economic interactions across

ranking, pricing, fraud, and search.

* Full-system ownership: Build and optimize end-to-end ML pipelines; from data

ingestion to GPU training to live inference.

* Complex surfaces, rich signals: Design systems for 3D content, UGC, avatar

metadata, behavioral and economic signals, not just text or images.

* Impact meets innovation: Shape the future of the Roblox economy while working

on frontier ML infra and GenAI workflows.

YOU WILL:

* Set the technical direction for ML systems powering core economy experiences:

personalization, ranking, generative modeling, and more

* Build and evolve infrastructure for training, serving, and evaluating both

traditional ML models and Generative AI models (e.g., embedding-based

retrieval, transformers, LLM-based workflows)

* Partner with GenAI teams to explore multi-modal embeddings, avatar

generation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in economic surfaces

Lead efforts to optimize ML system performance: low-latency serving,

efficient GPU training, and cost-aware inference strategies

* Guide the development of robust ML pipelines, online feature stores, and

experimentation platforms that support both predictive and generative use

cases

* Collaborate with EMs, tech leads, and product partners to align technical

architecture with business priorities

* Mentor senior engineers and help establish a strong technical culture across

the Economy ML team

* Ensure robustness, observability, and scalability of ML systems that power

millions of daily economic interactions

* Own the architecture behind some of Roblox’s most foundational ML systems

* Work across groups at Roblox to advance the state of ML/AI at the company.

* Help scale a fast-growing ML organization and define Roblox’s future economy

intelligence stack

* Solve real-world problems with real user impact, powering millions of

personalized, intelligent economic interactions every day

YOU HAVE:

* 10+ years of experience in software engineering or ML infrastructure, with a

strong focus on large-scale ML systems

* Deep expertise in building recommendation systems, ranking infrastructure, or

real-time personalization engines

* Hands-on experience with Generative AI, such as transformer-based models,

LLMs, embeddings, or RAG pipelines

* Proven experience with distributed training, model deployment, and

GPU-accelerated workflows

* Strong understanding of ML system architecture: data pipelines, feature

stores, inference optimization, experimentation tooling

* Systems-first mindset with strong instincts around scale, cost, performance,

and reliability

* Track record of leading large technical initiatives and mentoring senior

engineers

* BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

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 [https://careers.roblox.com/total-rewards].

Annual Salary Range

$397,460—$455,720 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.