Distinguished Engineer, Machine Learning Systems – Economy

San Mateo, CA, United StatesFull-TimeStaffAI / Data Science

Skills

Machine learning LLM A/B testing Mentoring Ownership RAG Large language models Transformers Embeddings Retrieval-augmented generation Inference optimization Distributed training

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Intro

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.

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.

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.
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 surfacesLead 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
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.

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.