Senior Engineering Manager, Communications at Roblox

Job description

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. As a Senior Engineering Manager, Communications, you'll lead the team responsible for in-game text chat — one of the most-used surfaces on Roblox and a cornerstone of how our community connects. Every day this system carries billions of messages across hundreds of millions of users, in real time, across 2D and 3D spaces, on every device we support. You'll own the roadmap and the engineering org behind it: building rich, immersive, and engaging communication experiences that let people and creators express themselves safely and seamlessly — better than in real life. This is a role for a leader who thinks like a product builder as much as an engineer. You'll balance the demands of massive scale and rock-solid reliability with a relentless focus on the user experience, shipping features that make conversation on Roblox feel effortless, expressive, and safe. You'll grow and develop a team of engineers, set technical direction, and partner deeply across product, design, trust & safety, and infrastructure to define what communication on Roblox becomes next. You Will Lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers building the in-game text chat platform, setting a high bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and career growth. Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging, balancing new product capabilities against scale, latency, reliability, and cost. Drive the architecture and evolution of messaging systems that reliably deliver billions of messages per day at low latency to a global, cross-platform audience. Partner with product and design to shape a compelling communication experience — treating chat as a product, not just infrastructure — and translate ambiguous goals into concrete plans and shipped features. Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to ensure every messaging experience is safe and civil by design for a young, global user base. Establish strong engineering practices around quality, observability, on-call health, and operational excellence for systems that must always be available. Communicate clearly and influence across the organization — with peers, leadership, and cross-functional partners — to align teams behind a shared direction. You Have 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams. A track record of building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale — ideally messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems. Strong product intuition: you make thoughtful tradeoffs between user experience, technical complexity, and speed, and you care about what you ship, not just how it's built. Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong grasp of reliability, latency, and the realities of running high-throughput services in production. Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers, and to build healthy, high-performing teams. Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a history of driving alignment across product, design, and engineering. A bias toward action and a comfort with ambiguity, especially at high scale. You Might Also Have Experience with real-time messaging protocols, presence systems, or high-fanout delivery infrastructure. Background in trust & safety, content moderation, or safety-critical systems. Experience building communication or social features for large, global, or youth audiences. Familiarity with cross-platform (mobile, console, desktop) product development. 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 $345,040 — $399,420 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.

Requirements

Must-haves

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.
Lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers building the in-game text chat platform, setting a high bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and career growth.
Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging, balancing new product capabilities against scale, latency, reliability, and cost.
Drive the architecture and evolution of messaging systems that reliably deliver billions of messages per day at low latency to a global, cross-platform audience.
Partner with product and design to shape a compelling communication experience — treating chat as a product, not just infrastructure — and translate ambiguous goals into concrete plans and shipped features.
Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to ensure every messaging experience is safe and civil by design for a young, global user base.
Establish strong engineering practices around quality, observability, on-call health, and operational excellence for systems that must always be available.
Communicate clearly and influence across the organization — with peers, leadership, and cross-functional partners — to align teams behind a shared direction.
8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams.
A track record of building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale — ideally messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems.
Strong product intuition: you make thoughtful tradeoffs between user experience, technical complexity, and speed, and you care about what you ship, not just how it's built.
Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a strong grasp of reliability, latency, and the realities of running high-throughput services in production.
Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers, and to build healthy, high-performing teams.
Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with a history of driving alignment across product, design, and engineering.
A bias toward action and a comfort with ambiguity, especially at high scale.
You Might Also Have
Experience with real-time messaging protocols, presence systems, or high-fanout delivery infrastructure.
Background in trust & safety, content moderation, or safety-critical systems.
Experience building communication or social features for large, global, or youth audiences.
Familiarity with cross-platform (mobile, console, desktop) product development.

Nice-to-haves

None flagged.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

Platform: greenhouse
Effort: quick

Benefits

Benefits detected in the listing.

Vision