Senior Software Engineer, Realtime Analytics Platform

Your Role:

Roblox's data infrastructure processes petabytes of data daily, powering analytics, ML, and product decisions for a platform serving 200M+ daily active users. As a Senior Software Engineer on our Real-time Analytics Platform team, you will design, build, and scale the core OLAP infrastructure powering sub-second analytical queries across Roblox. Our team directly owns and operates StarRocks and Apache Druid, driving high-throughput streaming ingestion and low-latency MPP query processing. You will lead the next-generation architecture of our real-time analytics platform, combining high ownership and deep technical complexity to push the boundaries of MPP engine performance, streaming ingestion pipelines, and cluster scalability. 

You Will:

• Own and Scale Core OLAP Platforms: Take end-to-end ownership of the architecture, operational health, and scalability of our high-throughput OLAP engines, specifically StarRocks and Apache Druid. 
• Optimize Query Engine Performance: Dive deep into engine internals, cost-based optimization (CBO), query planning, vectorized execution, memory optimization, and serialization efficiency to maximize throughput and maintain sub-second latency under heavy concurrent load. 
• Architect Streaming Ingestion Pipelines: Design, build, and optimize real-time data ingestion paths leveraging Apache Kafka, Apache Flink and native engine load mechanisms.
• Drive OLAP Data Modeling Best Practices: Partner with infra, data science, and product engineering teams to guide data modeling for MPP databases, optimizing partitioning, bucketing, sort keys, and materialized views. 
• Manage Cluster Infrastructure & Capacity: Lead cluster provisioning, lifecycle management, operations, and capacity planning using Kubernetes and Terraform across cloud environments. 
• Advance Autonomous Interfaces: Integrate AI/ML and LLM-driven capabilities within our query platforms to enable automated self-serve mechanisms and intelligent data discovery for engineers. 

You Have:

• 6+ years of experience building, designing, testing and maintaining production-grade, large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep OLAP & MPP Engine Depth: Strong hands-on engineering or operational experience with StarRocks or adjacent OLAP engines such as Apache Druid, ClickHouse, Apache Doris, Apache Pinot, or Trino/Presto. 
• Streaming & Ingestion Architecture: Proven track record implementing high-volume streaming ingestion using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Routine Load / Broker Load, or Debezium/CDC pipelines.
• Data Modeling & Query Optimization: Expertise in OLAP schema design (partitioning, bucketing, sort keys, indexing) and tuning cost-based SQL query engines for massive scale.
• Strong Engineering Foundations: Robust proficiency in Java, Go, C++, or Scala, with a track record of writing clean, highly performant distributed backend code. 
• Infrastructure & Orchestration: Experience operating, troubleshooting, and provisioning data infrastructure at scale using Kubernetes and Terraform on AWS or GCP. 
• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams, mentor engineers, and drive alignment on complex cross-cutting initiatives.
• B.S. equivalent in CS or sufficient experience.
• Bonus Points:
  • Core contributions to open-source OLAP databases (StarRocks, Apache Druid, ClickHouse, Apache Doris).
  • Experience operating real-time analytical platforms at consumer-internet scale (100M+ active users).