Director of Engineering, Economy ML

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone. The Economy ML team sits at the center of this mission. We build ML and AI systems that power personalization, search, pricing, recommendations, and virtual item intelligence across Roblox Economy surfaces, including Avatar Marketplace, Payments, Developer Monetization and Subscriptions. As Roblox continues to invest deeply in AI and ML, this organization also plays a key role in advancing next-generation AI capabilities across the company through close partnership with Discovery, Foundation AI, Engine, Creator and product engineering teams. Our work spans both product impact and foundational ML innovation at Roblox scale. We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead and scale Economy ML. This leader will define the strategy, organization, and execution model for a fast-growing ML organization spanning recommendation systems, ML infrastructure, search, content intelligence, and Generative AI applications. Why Roblox for ML/AI AI/ML is a top company priority , with strong executive support and long-term investment. Massive real-world scale: Millions of users, creators, and economic interactions every day. Unique technical challenges: Recommendations, pricing, fraud, search, and content understanding and generation across 3D assets, avatars, UGC, and virtual economies. End-to-end ownership: Drive strategy and execution from modeling and infrastructure to production impact. Frontier innovation: Apply modern ML and GenAI techniques to problems that do not exist anywhere else in the industry. You Will Define and lead the long-term strategy for Economy ML across core modeling, recommendations, search, pricing, content intelligence, and ML systems. Build and scale a high-performing ML engineering organization, including managers and senior ICs. Partner across teams to help advance shared AI technologies, infrastructure, and modeling capabilities that power experiences throughout Roblox. Lead investments in next-generation ML systems, including large-scale recommendation models, foundation models, semantic retrieval, and Generative AI workflows. Establish scalable ML development practices across experimentation, feature engineering, model serving, training infrastructure, and evaluation. Drive adoption of modern ML architectures including transformers, multi-task learning, retrieval systems, and multi-modal modeling. Partner with senior leadership to align technical investments with long-term business strategy and company priorities. Mentor engineering leaders and cultivate a strong technical and execution culture across the organization. Balance innovation and execution across both near-term product impact and long-term platform investments. You Have 12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant leadership experience managing engineering organizations. Experience leading teams focused on machine learning, recommendation systems, search, ranking, or large-scale distributed systems. Strong technical depth in ML systems, infrastructure, and modern machine learning architectures. Experience with recommendation systems, marketplace/e-commerce ML, search, or ads systems. Experience with Generative AI, LLMs, multi-modal models, or foundation model architectures. Experience operating at large scale, including high-throughput inference systems, distributed training, or real-time personalization platforms. Proven ability to drive cross-functional initiatives across multiple teams and organizations. Strong product and business intuition with a track record of delivering measurable impact. Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineering talent and leaders. 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 as described on this page . Annual Salary Range $399,420 — $457,970 USD Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted). 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 to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process. For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.