Distinguished Engineer - Machine Learning, Discovery

As a Distinguished Engineer/Technical Director on Discovery, you’ll be in charge of the overall technical vision and execution for all machine learning initiatives across search and discovery teams. The mission of these teams is to connect a billion users with the best connections and content at the right time, covering a very diverse range of search and recommendation problems at a high scale.  This is fundamental to how we personalize the experience to drive engagement and retention for Roblox users.  With daily active users growing at a record rate, we are looking for expert tech leaders who are passionate about crafting and building machine learning solutions to power Search and Recommendations.

You Will:

• Own the technical direction and implementation for the machine learning solutions that power the search and recommendation systems, driving Roblox content distribution.
• 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 crafting and building 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 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.

Annual Salary Range 419390 - 457970 USD