Distinguished Engineer (Machine Learning Systems, Economy)
Posted Updated
Description
- 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 surfaces
- Lead 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
- Deep technical expertise, you always start with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users and creators or internal engineers
- A creative and strategic approach to solving hard problems. You simplify the complex. You bring in fresh ideas from new places
- A generalist approach and you have mastered several languages and technologies already; you can easily adapt to any situation
- Initiated and facilitated challenging technical decisions across multiple teams and organizations. You are empathetic and find common understanding
- The ability to roll up your sleeves to tackle data problems or machine learning problems when they come up
- 10+ years of experience and a consistent record of delivering and improving large-scale search and recommendation systems
- The capability of breaking down long-term product requirements into iterative deliverable stages
- BS in Computer Science or a related discipline, MS/PhD are a definite plus
- Experience building and improving large scale machine learning models with billions of parameters and launching them into production