Distinguished Engineer (Technical Director)/Senior Principal Engi...
Roblox - San Mateo, California, United States, 94409
Work at Roblox
Overview
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Overview
How do we effectively adapt frontier LLMs to master the intricacies of Lua within the Roblox engine? Data is King (and Hard):
We have vast amounts of code, but transforming it into high-signal training data for SFT, preference tuning (RLHF, DPO, etc.), and robust evaluation is a complex machine learning and engineering challenge. We need to pioneer sophisticated quality signals and data mixing strategies. Beyond Instruction Following:
Moving past simple prompt-response towards genuine reasoning and problem-solving for complex coding tasks. How do we improve the model's ability to handle ambiguity, plan multi-step and multi-file code generation, and debug? Rigorous Evaluation:
Defining and implementing meaningful evaluations that capture true coding utility, beyond surface-level metrics. You Have: We need someone who lives and breathes improving LLM output quality, specifically for pushing performance in challenging, specialized domains. You are obsessed with the post-training loop:
You have deep, hands-on experience and intuition for techniques like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), data curation/mixology, and building robust evaluation suites. You understand the subtle interplay between data quality, model scale, and tuning strategies. You have competed and won at the highest levels:
You have a proven track record of taking state-of-the-art foundation models and significantly improving their capabilities on specific, difficult tasks – ideally code generation, but deep expertise demonstrated in any complex domain (e.g., mathematics, reasoning, native multimodal output, complex instruction following) is highly relevant. You've likely led teams of 25+ engineers pushing benchmark performance at leading AI labs or internal efforts within major tech companies. You are deeply technical and hands-on:
While you will lead technical direction, you aren't afraid to dive into the weeds to diagnose tricky model behavior, analyze failure modes, or prototype new data processing techniques. You understand the mechanics, not just the concepts. You think rigorously about data:
You appreciate that progress is often gated by data quality and effective curation. You have experience designing and scaling data annotation efforts and developing signals to identify high-quality data for specialized domains. Qualifications:
A strong academic background (MS/PhD preferred) in CS, ML, or a related quantitative field.
Proven track record with 15+ years of experience including deep expertise in frontier LLM post-training. Fluent in ML frameworks (like PyTorch) and data processing tools (like PySpark).
You Will: Define and drive the technical roadmap for improving Roblox Assistant's code generation and reasoning capabilities through advanced LLM post-training. Lead the design and execution of experiments in fine-tuning, preference alignment, and data strategy. Establish rigorous evaluation methodologies to measure true progress in coding assistance. Work closely with ML engineers, providing technical guidance and mentorship focused specifically on model improvement techniques. Stay at the absolute forefront of LLM research and apply relevant advancements to our specific challenges. Contribute to the core intellectual challenges of making AI a powerful, reliable tool for millions of software creators. Why Roblox? Unmatched Scale & Impact:
Directly influence how millions of creators build on a platform with 80M+ daily active users. Unique Dataset & Domain:
Access to a massive, unique corpus of Lua code, creator interactions, and 3D environment context – an incredible sandbox for specializing models. Focused Challenge:
A chance to dedicate your expertise to solving a critical, concrete problem in AI-assisted creation at the cutting edge. If you are deeply passionate about pushing the boundaries of LLM capabilities for game development and want to apply your skills to redefine coding assistance for a massive creative community, we encourage you to apply. For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits. Annual Salary Range:
$391,590 — $448,990 USD Roles that are based in our San Mateo, CA Headquarters are in-office Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional in-office on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). You’ll Love: Industry-leading compensation package Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage A rewarding 401k program Flexible vacation policy (varies by exemption status) Roflex - Flexible and supportive work policy Roblox Admin badge for your avatar At Roblox HQ: Free catered lunches five times a week and several fully stocked kitchens with unlimited snacks Onsite fitness center and fitness program credit Annual CalTrain Go Pass Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations for all candidates during the interview process.
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