Distinguished Engineer, Machine Learning - Economy

At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower a global community of creators and developers to build immersive experiences and a dynamic virtual economy. Our Economy ML team sits at the heart of this mission, delivering scalable machine learning systems that power personalization, pricing, search, and content understanding across all Economy surfaces: Marketplace, Developer Monetization, Payments, and Avatar.

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.

Why Roblox for ML Systems

• 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.

You Will:

• Set the technical direction and implementation for the machine learning solutions that power core economy experiences: personalization, ranking, generative modeling, and more.
• Author specs for new features and improvements. You would be responsible for setting the AI strategy, pushing the frontier of recommendation technology, and driving business outcomes across candidate generation, ranking, objective functions, and value delivery for both users and developers.
• 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)
• You will co-design models and systems, working at the intersection of model architecture and infrastructure, partnering closely with core modelers, data and AI infrastructure engineers, and product teams to push the boundaries of large-scale training and serving.
• Lead other engineers by example and through technical direction as an individual contributor and create an engineering culture of excellence
• Become an authority on our technology stack and make sure we always build new solutions the right way
• Collaborate with other teams within Roblox to make sure we are building products with community and company first attitude.
• Balance researching new technologies with a practical approach to realize the research efforts into the Roblox products
• Collaborate with the industry and communities where applicable and be ambassador for Roblox.

You Have:

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