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. Roblox’s data platform processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions. The Data Platform Compute team owns the compute layer underneath it: the Kubernetes (EKS) clusters where all of Roblox’s Spark workloads run, and the software that lets engineers, analysts, and ML practitioners submit and run that work reliably and cost-effectively. As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will build and operate the systems that sit between our users and the cluster. These include the Spark job submission service, our internal Spark libraries, interactive notebook compute, and cluster lifecycle automation. You’ll have real ownership, you’ll work on problems where the design is not yet settled, and you’ll help decide which technologies Roblox adopts next. You Will: Build and own core compute platform services: Design, build, and operate the software behind Spark job submission, including APIs, scheduling integration, and the libraries users depend on. Launch interactive Spark at scale: Deliver Spark Connect to support notebook workflows, including provisioning and managing the EKS compute that backs them, with sensible isolation, resource limits, and cost controls. Run a safe, automated cluster fleet: Build fleet management automation for EKS, such as blue-green rollouts that validate new AMIs and Kubernetes versions before they reach production workloads, with minimal disruption to running jobs. Make jobs run better without user effort: Develop our auto-tuner, which analyzes Spark history and event logs to recommend or apply job configuration changes that improve performance and reduce cost. Own batch scheduling on Kubernetes: Operate and upgrade our YuniKorn-based scheduling, including queue design, quotas, fairness across tenants, and version upgrades. Shape what we adopt next: Evaluate emerging technology such as native Spark acceleration (e.g., Apache Comet). Run rigorous benchmarks on real Roblox workloads and make a clear recommendation backed by data. Be an owner of reliability and cost: Define SLOs and metrics, build observability, and drive down toil, incidents, and compute spend across a multi-tenant platform. Partner across the company: Work with data engineering, ML, analytics, and infrastructure teams to understand their needs, communicate changes, and migrate users to better paths. You Have: 5+ years of experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems or infrastructure platforms. Spark on Kubernetes: Hands-on experience running Apache Spark on Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, or self-managed) as a platform, including executor and driver behavior, resource tuning, and troubleshooting failed or slow jobs. We are looking for platform builders, not just Spark users. Kubernetes depth: Strong experience operating production Kubernetes clusters at scale, such as upgrades, node lifecycle, autoscaling, and operators or controllers. Engineering foundations: Strong proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, Scala, or Clojure , with a track record of writing clean, well-tested, maintainable backend code. Python is a plus, since much of our tuning and analysis tooling uses it. Cloud fluency: Experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, S3) or GCP equivalents, and infrastructure-as-code. Operational ownership: Experience taking a system from design through production operation, including on-call, incident response, and observability. Technical leadership: Ability to influence design decisions across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on cross-cutting changes. B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience. Bonus Points: Experience with YuniKorn, Volcano, Kueue, or other batch schedulers on Kubernetes. Experience with Spark Connect, Livy, Kyuubi, or other interactive and gateway layers for Spark. Experience with the Spark Operator, Karpenter, Helm, Terraform, or Argo. Experience building tooling that uses Spark event logs or metrics for tuning, cost attribution, or anomaly detection. Experience maintaining internal Spark builds or driving Spark version upgrades. Familiarity with native execution engines (Comet, Gluten, Velox) or JVM performance tuning. Experience migrating workloads from YARN/Hadoop to Kubernetes. Contributions to open-source projects in the data or Kubernetes ecosystem. Experience operating at consumer-internet scale (100M+ users). 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 $243,290 — $295,250 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.
Build and own core compute platform services: Design, build, and operate the software behind Spark job submission, including APIs, scheduling integration, and the libraries users depend on.
Launch interactive Spark at scale: Deliver Spark Connect to support notebook workflows, including provisioning and managing the EKS compute that backs them, with sensible isolation, resource limits, and cost controls.
Make jobs run better without user effort: Develop our auto-tuner, which analyzes Spark history and event logs to recommend or apply job configuration changes that improve performance and reduce cost.
Own batch scheduling on Kubernetes: Operate and upgrade our YuniKorn-based scheduling, including queue design, quotas, fairness across tenants, and version upgrades.
Shape what we adopt next: Evaluate emerging technology such as native Spark acceleration (e.g., Apache Comet). Run rigorous benchmarks on real Roblox workloads and make a clear recommendation backed by data.
Be an owner of reliability and cost: Define SLOs and metrics, build observability, and drive down toil, incidents, and compute spend across a multi-tenant platform.
Partner across the company: Work with data engineering, ML, analytics, and infrastructure teams to understand their needs, communicate changes, and migrate users to better paths.
5+ years of experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems or infrastructure platforms.
Kubernetes depth: Strong experience operating production Kubernetes clusters at scale, such as upgrades, node lifecycle, autoscaling, and operators or controllers.
Cloud fluency: Experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, S3) or GCP equivalents, and infrastructure-as-code.
Operational ownership: Experience taking a system from design through production operation, including on-call, incident response, and observability.
Technical leadership: Ability to influence design decisions across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on cross-cutting changes.
B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.

Nice-to-haves

Experience with YuniKorn, Volcano, Kueue, or other batch schedulers on Kubernetes.
Experience with Spark Connect, Livy, Kyuubi, or other interactive and gateway layers for Spark.
Experience with the Spark Operator, Karpenter, Helm, Terraform, or Argo.
Experience building tooling that uses Spark event logs or metrics for tuning, cost attribution, or anomaly detection.
Experience maintaining internal Spark builds or driving Spark version upgrades.
Familiarity with native execution engines (Comet, Gluten, Velox) or JVM performance tuning.
Experience migrating workloads from YARN/Hadoop to Kubernetes.
Contributions to open-source projects in the data or Kubernetes ecosystem.
Experience operating at consumer-internet scale (100M+ users).

Application prep

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

Keywords to mirror

mlkubernetesgojavapythonawsgcp

Platform: greenhouse
Effort: quick

Benefits

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Vision