Jobs in United States

Principal Game Designer in San Mateo

46 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current principal game designer jobs in San Mateo. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 Principal Software Engineer on the Engine DataModel team, you will own and innovate on the foundational components that form the backbone of the Roblox platform. In the Roblox Engine, the DataModel is a tree-like structure that is analogous to a scenegraph in other 3D engines. This role will report to the engineering manager and will be based out of our HQ in San Mateo, CA in a hybrid model 3 days a week (Tuesdays to Thursdays). Our team owns: The core structures and systems are used to build the DataModel and interact with it. The C++ reflection bindings that form the Engine’s Luau API surface and let creators interact with the DataModel. We’ve built custom codegen tooling to generate the C++ for these reflection bindings and other related structures. DataModel serialization … and much more! You will: Develop engine code that performs well for all user-created games on the Roblox platform. Build the core systems and data structures used in the Roblox engine, working with other teams to find universal solutions. Take ownership of projects throughout their full lifecycles. Execute code that performs well on all the devices Roblox supports—from desktop clients to mobile phone clients to

AWSGitAIC++
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. From the early days, simulated physics has been the foundation of the way users build in Roblox. Our physics engine enables dynamic environments with emergent behavior making games more immersive and exciting. The Physics team develops Roblox's proprietary distributed physics engine. Our team implements the mathematical models behind our dynamic simulation engine, and ships engine APIs and tools that developers use every day. These models incorporate rigid body dynamics arising from external forces, collisions, and constraints while optimizing for real-time performance. We work on integrating the low level physics solver into the rest of the engine for online gameplay across multiple platforms. You will report to the Physics Environment Engineering Manager. You Will: Innovate and implement powerful physics features that empower Roblox developers to create immersive and dynamic experiences. Drive innovation through research and rapid prototyping , translating new ideas into practical solutions that stand the test of time. Optimize and enhance the robustness and performance of the physics engine and its integrations, ensuring a seamless user experience. Collaborate with internal teams and ext

AWSGitRestAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. Why Content Safety? As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer for Content Safety, you will define the future of proactive moderation, driving immense social impact through cutting-edge, innovative ML solutions, focused on critical and ambiguous safety challenges. You will set the 3-5 year technical strategy and architectural blueprint for how Roblox uses machine learning for content moderation. You will own the architectural and execution roadmap of massive-scale ML systems that mitigate violative UGC content before it impacts our community. You will feel a deep sense of responsibility in proactively protecting our community thoughtfully and fairly, while balancing user freedom with platform civility. Your efforts will ensure Roblox remains one of the safest places on the internet for our broad community of over 100 million daily active users. You will: Define and Own the Technical Vision: Define and lead the multi-year technical vision, architectural strategy, and execution for machine learning solutions in Content Safety, ensuring these systems proactively and effectively detect and mitigate violative content at massive scale. Strategic Stakeholder Partnership: Collaborate with execu

AWSGitMachine LearningAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. With Roblox Ads & Discovery business growing at a rapid rate, we are building large scale ads machine learning infrastructure to deliver more value to our users and our advertisers. As a Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, you’ll build scalable, reliable, and high-performance infrastructure that powers ML systems across our organization. You’ll operate at the scales of hundreds of billions of engagements, and redefine how we deliver performance ads to hundreds of millions of users. You will: You will co-design models and systems, working at the intersection of model architecture and ML infrastructure, partnering closely with core modelers, data and AI infrastructure engineers, and product teams to push the boundaries of large-scale training and serving. Your work will span recommendation, search, and agentic applications, including large transformer architectures, LLMs, generative rankers, and efficient offline and online content-understanding systems. You will investigate model, data, and systems tradeoffs end to end—from data pipelines and distributed training to low-latency inference and production serving. This includes designing efficient KV-cache strategies, applying p

AWSGitMachine LearningAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. Discovery UX sits at the intersection of product innovation and high-scale infrastructure. Every Roblox user starts their journey on the homepage, and every Roblox developer needs to find their correct audience. Our team works closely with product and engineering teams across Roblox to bridge this gap by improving the user journey from landing on Roblox to joining an experience. We primarily work on Home, Search, Charts, and Experience Details pages, for both the Roblox website and app. As a Principal Software Engineer , you will craft robust, extensible systems for high-traffic surfaces. While you are a frontend expert at heart, you are a versatile engineer who isn't afraid to dive into the backend or data pipelines to ship a complete feature. You will drive solutions using React and modern technologies, helping us build efficiently across devices. If you have a deep understanding of frontend architecture and a genuine curiosity for diving into data to understand "the why" behind an experiment, you will be right at home with us. This role reports to the Engineering Manager on the Discovery UX team. You Will: Design, build, and ship features that define the discovery journey for millions of

JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaReact
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. Every day, tens of millions of people from around the world come to Roblox to play, learn, work, and socialize in immersive digital experiences created by the community. Our vision is to build a platform that enables shared experiences among billions of users. This is what’s known as the metaverse: a persistent space where anyone can do just about anything they can imagine, from anywhere in the world and on any device. Join us and you’ll usher in a new category of human interaction while solving exceptional challenges that you won’t find anywhere else. As a Principal Network Engineer, you will work cross-functionally to plan the growth of Roblox’s global production network to support rapid user growth. In this role, you are responsible for Engineering and Architecture of Roblox Backbone and Edge Network. You will ensure that we are making the right investments with our global expansion to provide a great experience for all our users worldwide. We run services and a hosting platform with some unique complexities, so this role is an opportunity for the experienced network engineer to take on new challenges in addition to applying their existing expertise. You Will: Serve as a Principle Engine

PythonAWSGitAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $345K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 Principal Software Engineer on the Compute team, you will be the technical anchor for Roblox's GPU and AI accelerator capabilities. This is a battle-tested GPU expert role focused on the machine management layer and above: how GPU hosts are made production-ready, kept healthy, and turned into reliable compute for the workloads that depend on them. You will own the hard problems that show up only at scale, from driver and firmware management to GPU health, reliability, and performance across a rapidly growing fleet of accelerators spanning Roblox data centers and cloud environments. You will set the technical direction for GPU compute and up-level the entire organization's GPU expertise. You will: Serve as the GPU technical leader for the Compute team, partnering across Kubernetes, Machine Bootstrap, Networking, and Cloud to drive GPU strategy end to end. Own the GPU host lifecycle above raw fleet management: driver, firmware, and CUDA stack management, GPU health and telemetry, and remediation of GPU-specific failures (XID errors, ECC, thermal, NVLink and fabric faults). Architect how GPU capacity is exposed to compute platforms, including scheduling, isolation, and integration with Ku

AWSKubernetesGitAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $293.8K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 database team develops the next-generation, multi-tenant database platform that elastically scales and underpins every online data workload at Roblox. As a principal engineer on the database team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch critical database capabilities that keep our services fast, reliable and efficient at global scale. You will report to the Technical Director for Storage. You will: Design and implement new engine features —indexing, storage formats, WAL and replication protocols, sharding, and query-planner enhancements—that push latency, throughput, and availability boundaries. Evolve the control plane to deliver elastic scaling, autonomous healing, and zero-downtime schema or tenant moves across global regions. Profile and optimize critical code paths using kernel-level tracing and advanced performance tooling; drive systematic tail-latency reductions. Establish engineering best practices by leading design reviews, performance benchmarks, failure drills, and post-incident retrospectives. Automate everything : develop frameworks for testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, and autoscaling so that the platform operates hands-off at scale. Ment

SQLPostgreSQLMySQLAWS
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. Why Connections? As a Principal Software Engineer on the Connections team, your work will power the Roblox ecosystem, helping people recognize and connect with friends & interests on Roblox, express themselves, and discover & engage with the best of Roblox through their connections. You will own critical features used by millions of users daily, including profiles, names, online presence, co-play tools, and social proof, while also developing new zero-to-one features. If you are an experienced developer who loves to write code, ship user-facing features, mentor engineers, up-level frontend development, and drive product vision, you’ll have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on this team. This role is based at Roblox HQ in San Mateo, CA (no remote option). You Will: Design, build, and ship features that power the social graph for millions of users Architect scalable, long-term solutions Collaborate with teams across the company to translate ambitious business goals into a concrete, multi-year technical roadmap Serve as a technical leader, setting engineering standards and mentoring other engineers You Have: 8+ years of experience in software development with web

JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaReact
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $277.4K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 Technical Program Manager for Compute Infrastructure, you will lead technical programs to develop and rollout next generation technology solutions to process a diverse spectrum of infrastructure workloads across Roblox services to enable users around the world to efficiently, reliably, and securely enjoy the Roblox Platform. You Have: Been a technical leader with domain expertise in systems and software used to process and manage Cloud and on-prem Infrastructure 7+ years of experience in software industry driving the build of large-scale infrastructure Experienced with establishing work relationships across multi-disciplinary teams and earning trust as a technical leader with all partners Experienced with identifying critical technical problems and opportunities Experienced with delivering end to end technical programs through roadmapping and reliable execution Able to turn specific solutions into systems that benefit the larger community in the long run Knowledgeable about user needs, scoping, planning, execution and delivery Flexible around process, using process as a tool when it makes sense for a team Experience with Kubernetes, Cloud platforms (e.g. AWS), and AI/ML infrastru

AWSKubernetesGitAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $295.3K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. Join some of the best Graphics Engineers in the world supporting the largest immersive 3D streaming environment deployed across console, desktop, mobile, and VR. Scalability: Roblox provides a platform that guarantees to the creators that their games will always and automatically run on different devices, with cross-platform play and minimal load times. Compatibility: Roblox games and assets made in the past, are still working today. Rendering has to have an eye to the past, and an eye to the future… Community: Roblox games are made by creators of all experience levels, from professionals who earn their living on the platform to kids who are learning to program using Roblox! As a Rendering Engineer, you will solve difficult challenges, while continuing to build a high-speed, completely dynamic environments connected on all devices. Many established rendering techniques do not trivially apply to our platform - novel solutions are needed as we push Roblox towards higher targets of visual fidelity. Even the simpler visuals we support on low-power devices are enabled by some creative rendering ideas, often centered around caching, incremental computation and graceful degradation. All of this is

AWSGitRestAI
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $345K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 Principal Software Engineer leading Fleet Management, you will be the overall technical lead across three pods and the person who sets the technical direction for the fleet management layer of Roblox. This is a hands-on, deeply technical leadership role that owns all of Roblox's compute capacity end to end: from low-level provisioning and the data plane, up through the control planes that operate it, and all the way to the UI and internal-facing products that let teams self-serve capacity. Your org centralizes security, maintenance operations, and the uptime of every Roblox Kubernetes cluster, and governs the internal customer contracts that drive automation across the fleet spanning Roblox data centers and cloud providers. You will guide architecture, raise the engineering bar, and make sure compute capacity supply and demand stay in balance as the fleet grows. You will: Serve as the overall technical lead for three Fleet Management pods, setting and aligning the technical direction across low-level provisioning, the data plane, and the control plane and product surfaces above them. Architect the declarative, Kubernetes-style control planes that operate Roblox's compute fleet across o

SQLAWSKubernetesGit
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $326.1K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 Principal Security Software Engineer, you will be reporting to the Manager of Application Security leading the Security Design and Review pod. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the growth of Information Security's (InfoSec) Application Security team, collaborating with engineering teams early in their processes to provide secure design solutions and establish security standards. Your responsibilities will include threat modeling, secure system design, automation, and penetration testing. As a key member of the team, you will drive company-wide projects across diverse tech stacks, working with engineering leaders to remediate security challenges. You will define and evolve the technical vision for scaling application security practices across the organization. You will: Lead company-wide security initiatives to address critical security challenges. Build and nurture cross-company relationships to achieve security objectives. Provide guidance on product security processes and standards. Define and expand partnerships with key engineering teams across Roblox. Apply critical thinking and analytical skills to develop security protocols and communicate effectively with stakeholders. Re

PythonAWSGitLinux
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $307.4K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. WHY DATA SCIENCE & ANALYTICS? The Data Science & Analytics organization's mission is to increase our speed, frequency and acumen of making decisions at scale by instilling a data-influenced approach to building products. We cover a wide area of the data spectrum including analytical data engineering, product analytics, experimentation, causal inference, statistical modeling and machine learning. Aligned and partnering with product verticals, we use this extensive tool belt to discover new opportunities and unmet use cases, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build data products and measure impact on our community of players and developers. WHY DISCOVERY EXPERIENCES? Roblox is not just a platform; it is a complex, two-sided marketplace where millions of creators meet over 70 million daily active users. The Discovery Experiences team is the technical heartbeat of this ecosystem. We own the surfaces—Home, Search, Matchmaking, and Notifications—that determine how users navigate the metaverse. As a Data Scientist , you will own the ranking initiatives that power these canvases. You aren't just building models; you are building the economic and social f

PythonSQLAWSGit
R
📍 San Mateo, CA, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

From $278.5K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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. ML Platform @ Roblox today supports hundreds of ML use cases and billions of inferences per day across Discovery, Safety, Engine, and much more. As an Infrastructure Engineer on the ML Platform team, you will design, scale, and maintain the foundational infrastructure powering our entire machine learning ecosystem. We are looking for accomplished engineers to spearhead the development of our next-generation ML tooling and platform capabilities. You will: Bootstrap and maintain Kubernetes and Cloud infrastructure for ML Platform components--Serving Layer, Metadata Store, Model Registry, and Pipeline Orchestrator. Set technical strategy and oversee development of high scale and reliable infrastructure systems. Propose and implement new platform tooling to improve time to production for MLEs and Data Scientists across the full ML lifecycle. Work on infrastructure projects such as GPU fleet management, hybrid-cloud orchestration, and writing custom Kubernetes controllers and resources. Stay abreast of industry trends in machine learning and infrastructure to ensure the adoption of leading-edge technologies and practices. Partner across organizations to build tooling, interfaces, and visualizati

AWSGCPDockerKubernetes
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