Senior Software Engineer (Frontend/Engine), Messaging

Location: San Mateo, CA, United States

Department: Software Engineering

Text chat is one of the most visible and widely used features on Roblox, with over 2 billion messages processed daily. Every day, tens of millions of players rely on it to coordinate, connect, and express themselves across thousands of games. It is also one of our highest-leverage engine services: our core text communication APIs are deeply embedded in the Roblox game engine, empowering tens of thousands of creators to build customized communication experiences in their games.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll own the full frontend and engine-layer architecture of this system — from the React-based UI that players interact with daily, to the Lua/C++ service APIs that power creator integrations. You'll be the person who makes text communication feel immersive, seamless in both 2D and 3D, safe, and expressive across mobile, PC, console and VR — at a scale few engineers ever get to work at.

While our scope is vast, our teams remain intentionally lean to ensure impact. This gives you significant ownership, allowing you to lead cross-functional workstreams and shape our long-term roadmap from your first day.

You will:

• Design and deploy a cross-platform chat user interface, developing innovative solutions to optimize and scale systems that serve tens of millions of daily active users across mobile, PC, Mac, and console platforms.
• Design and evolve the TextChatService engine APIs that creators use to build custom communication features — one of the most widely used services in the Roblox game engine
• Lead the platformization of chat: standardizing and centralizing core components so other teams can build reliably on top of a shared communication foundation
• Drive innovation on upcoming products — cross-server communication, rich text, emotes, replies — and give developers the primitives to build deeply integrated social experiences in their games.
• Build and improve moderation and intervention systems in partnership with Trust & Safety, helping uphold global and regional policy compliance across developer-customized experiences
• Enforce high quality standards while we iterate on feature development.
• Collaborate with other engineering and product teams (Game engine, Creator, Trust & Safety to name a few) at the company to push the boundary of what is possible.
• Own projects end-to-end: architecture, cross-functional alignment, implementation, launch, and long-term reliability
• Raise the bar on code quality, performance, and engineering practices across the team; mentor engineers and help grow future talent

You have:

• 5+ years of experience as a front-end or client apps engineer working on complex user interfaces.
• Strong experience with React and/or React Native (or similar frameworks — Vue, Angular, Svelte) — fluent in component architecture, state management, and performance optimization
• Hold a Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.
• Experience designing client/server boundaries and APIs for high-scale products, with solid instincts around caching, latency, and reliability
• Experience collaborating cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Data Science to drive measurable outcomes

You are: 

• Responsible: you build systems that work and keep on working reliably. You are thorough in your designs, rigorous in handling potential failure cases, and diligent in automated testing.
• Analytically sharp — you quantify problems before solving them and define success metrics before you ship
• Creative and strategic — you approach hard, ambiguous problems with curiosity and find elegant solutions where others see constraints
• Team-oriented: You are able to work well as part of a team and know how to collaborate with all participants to develop the best solutions. Able to write clear design specs, mentor junior engineers, and guide projects from beginning to end

Bonus:

• Experience building real-time communication products and features (chat, voice, or messaging)
• Experience working closely with design, strong design interest/background.
• Experience shipping on constrained environments — mobile memory, CPU budgets, framerate targets
• Familiarity with Lua or C++ (relevant for engine-layer work on TextChatService)
• Familiarity with A/B testing and product experimentation at scale
• Experience of test driven development.