[2027] Senior Software Engineer - Data Acquisition PhD Early Career
Roblox is hiring a [2027] Senior Software Engineer - Data Acquisition PhD Early Career in San Mateo, United States. It pays $197k-$243k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Roblox.
Level's read on this job
- Works on AI ●●●○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Pay on this posting starts 17% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- The posting mentions visa sponsorship.
- The posting mentions Python, APIs and AI data labeling among its tools and skills.
- Roblox has 266 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Build data ingestion infrastructure and tooling to source and process training data for future foundation models.
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.
Our Data Intake team owns the tooling that sources and processes the training data that Roblox’s future foundation models are built on. As an engineer on the team, you’ll help build out a new service that can obtain diverse datasets from a wide variety of external sources, process them into consistent formats, and store them in a reliable and easily accessible location for our models to leverage. You’ll collaborate closely with teammates across the company in data labeling and machine learning to ensure we deliver the datasets our customers need.
This role offers the chance to be a founding team member and help define both the technical direction and the long-term shape of the product area from the ground up. This role is a great fit for you if you enjoy building and iterating quickly on new internal product offerings, are proficient in designing and scaling robust API integrations and data infrastructure, and have a zeal for developing inspiring, easily maintainable, and reusable code. Join our team and make a significant impact at Roblox.
You Will:
- Help architect and deliver a high-performance analytics environment that serves thousands of queries daily
- Design and scale robust data infrastructure for powering data retrieval and visualization
- Ensure data systems are reliable, observable, privacy-compliant, and performant
- Bridge the gap between data engineering, analytics, and infrastructure to deliver a suite of best-in class, fully featured, and easy to use data tools.
- Build intelligent agentic automation to simplify and accelerate analytical workflows
- Contribute to internal platforms and tools that abstract complexity, improve developer productivity, and accelerate innovation
- Self-organize and take ownership of projects throughout their full lifecycle
You Have:
- Possessing or pursuing a PhD in computer science, engineering, or a related field, with a thesis aligned to Roblox’s research areas.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g.,SQL,Python or R)
- Proficiency in big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark, or Airflow.
- Experience in developing production solutions is a plus.
- Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills; enjoy and passionate about building systems that enable and accelerate team productivity
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$196,750—$243,290 USDRoles 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.
How we rate this
[2027] Senior Software Engineer - Data Acquisition PhD Early Career at Roblox rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $197k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 17% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you keep labeling instructions consistent across a large annotation team?
- Tell me about a project where data engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where data infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Data Labeling, Data Engineering, Data Infrastructure, Distributed Systems, and Machine learning. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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