Principal Software Engineer, Orchestration

Roblox, San Mateo, CA

The role

Roblox’s data platform powers analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a Principal Software Engineer in the Data Platform Orchestration team, you will be the technical leader for the system that schedules and runs the company’s data workloads. Our team owns Apache Airflow and the Kubernetes (EKS) infrastructure underneath it, running 8,000+ DAGs every day, most of them Spark jobs. You will set the long-term architecture for how Roblox orchestrates data at scale, and you will be hands-on in making it faster, more reliable, and easier for hundreds of engineers to use.

All jobs

Principal Software Engineer, Orchestration

Roblox, San Mateo, CA

Posted pay

$295K–$345K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for principal software engineering jobs in the Bay Area.

Median: $280K a year
Other jobs in the group: 223

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: San Mateo, CA
Work type: Not given
Level: Principal
Experience: 10+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
AWS
Kubernetes
Java
Go
Terraform
Spark
Airflow
Helm
Prometheus
Posted: 22 days ago
Last check: 8 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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Roblox

Open tech jobs: 215
With posted pay: 99%
Median posted base: $243K–$295K

About Roblox: funding, hiring and pay

Roblox

About Roblox: funding, hiring and pay

Company facts

Money raised: $918MSum of funding rounds on record
Newest raise: Jun 2, 2026First sale on an SEC filing

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

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The role

What you need

B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience.
10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production-grade, large-scale distributed systems.
Workflow Orchestration Depth: Deep, hands-on experience designing, running, and scaling a production data-related workflow orchestrator or job scheduler (thousands of workflows or DAGs a day). Apache Airflow is ideal, but experience with an equivalent system (Dagster, Prefect, Temporal, or a large in-house scheduler) is also welcome. You understand scheduler and executor design, metadata store performance, task isolation, retries and idempotency, and safe upgrades and migrations.
Kubernetes Expertise: Proven experience managing and scaling production Kubernetes clusters on AWS (EKS), including Helm, autoscaling (Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler), and GitOps-style deployment.
Software Engineering Foundations: Strong proficiency in Python, plus Go or Java, with a record of writing clean, well-tested platform and tooling code. You are a software engineer who builds and improves systems, not someone who mainly handles tickets and operations.
Data Workload Familiarity: Working knowledge of how Spark jobs run on Kubernetes (Spark on K8s, spark-operator, or EMR on EKS) and how orchestration interacts with them.
Platform Mindset: Experience building platforms used by other engineers, with strong instincts for APIs, observability, reliability, and developer experience.
Cross-Organizational Technical Leadership: A track record of influencing direction across a large engineering organization and driving multi-quarter projects from concept to production.
Extreme Ownership: You define the problem when requirements are unclear, unblock dependencies, and see complex work through to stable production.
Bonus Points:
Contributions to Apache Airflow or related open-source projects (Airflow providers, Helm chart, spark-operator, Karpenter, Argo CD).
Experience with other orchestration systems (Dagster, Temporal, Argo Workflows, Flyte) and the judgment to know when each fits.
Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code, Prometheus/OpenTelemetry, and cost optimization or chargeback for shared platforms.
Experience operating infrastructure at consumer-internet scale.

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.

Principal Software Engineer, Orchestration

The role

Principal Software Engineer, Orchestration

The role

What you will do

What you need

Annual Salary Range

About Roblox

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