Distinguished Engineer, Marketplace

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. Roblox is looking for a Distinguished Engineer for Marketplace within our Economy team to lead the technical strategy for how millions of users discover and acquire digital content. The Marketplace is the engine of our virtual economy, and this role focuses on the intersection of shopping, expression, and the foundational systems that power them. You will oversee the technical direction for Avatar UGC systems, systems across the creator/supply side and user/demand side of an open Marketplace, ensuring that our infrastructure supports a seamless shopping experience and the rich expression of digital identities while providing the solutions for creator success. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can navigate complex distributed systems while maintaining a strong product intuition to build features that resonate with our global community. You Will: Drive Shopping & Expression: Lead the technical direction for marketplace shopping experiences, ensuring users can easily find, evaluate, and acquire items for their avatars. Architect Avatar UGC Systems: Design and evolve the infrastructure that supports the lifecycle of 3D content, metadata, and behavioral signals for the Avatar ecosystem. Lead Foundation Teams: Oversee the core teams building the scalable infrastructure, data pipelines, and services that serve as the bedrock for all Marketplace transactions. Master Distributed Systems: Build and optimize high-performance, low-latency distributed systems capable of handling millions of daily economic interactions at a massive scale. Deep-Dive into the Stack: Operate as a hands-on leader, capable of diving into various aspects of the tech stack, from backend services to complex data flows and client architecture, to ensure technical excellence. Balance Tech and Product: Use strong product intuition to align technical architecture with business priorities, breaking down long-term requirements into iterative technical stages. Mentor and Culture-Build: Guide senior engineers and tech leads, establishing a strong technical culture of robustness, observability, and reliability. You Have: 10+ Years of Experience: A proven track record in software engineering or infrastructure, with a heavy focus on large-scale distributed systems. Deep Systems Expertise: Extensive experience with scalable architectures, high-performance systems, and the "systems-first" mindset required for massive scale. Product Intuition: The ability to move between deep technical implementation and high level product strategy, ensuring engineering efforts drive user and developer value. Full-Stack Versatility: Proven ability to adapt to various technologies and "roll up your sleeves" to tackle complex infrastructure challenges across the stack. Leadership Track Record: Experience initiating significant technical decisions across multiple teams and mentoring senior technical talent. Academic Background: BS in Computer Science or a related field; MS or PhD is a definite plus. You’ll Love: Owning the Foundation: Designing the architecture behind Roblox’s most foundational economic and expression systems. Massive Impact: Solving real-world problems that directly affect millions of users and creators every day. Collaborative Innovation: Working across groups to advance the state of the art in virtual economies and virtual identity. 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 $399,420 — $457,970 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.