Senior Engineering Manager, Communications

About the Role

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Communications, you'll lead the team responsible for in-game text chat — one of the most-used surfaces on Roblox carrying billions of real-time messages across hundreds of millions of users daily. You'll own the roadmap and the engineering team behind it, driving rich, immersive, and engaging communication experiences across 2D and 3D spaces on every supported device.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and develop a team of software engineers building the in-game text chat platform, setting a high bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and career growth.
• Own the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for real-time text messaging, balancing new product capabilities against scale, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Drive the architecture and evolution of messaging systems that reliably deliver billions of messages per day at low latency to a global, cross-platform audience.
• Partner with product and design to shape a compelling communication experience, translating ambiguous goals into concrete plans and shipped features.
• Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, Policy, and ML teams to ensure every messaging experience is safe and civil by design.
• Establish strong engineering practices around quality, observability, on-call health, and operational excellence for high-availability systems.
• Communicate clearly and influence across peers, leadership, and cross-functional partners to align teams behind a shared direction.

Qualifications

Minimum Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years managing and growing engineering teams.
• Track record of building and shipping consumer-facing products at scale (messaging, communications, social, or other real-time systems preferred).
• Strong product intuition with ability to balance user experience, technical complexity, and speed.
• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, with strong grasp of reliability, latency, and high-throughput production services.
• Demonstrated ability to attract, develop, and retain strong engineers.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
• Comfort with ambiguity and bias toward action at scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with real-time messaging protocols, presence systems, or high-fanout delivery infrastructure.
• Background in trust & safety, content moderation, or safety-critical systems.
• Experience building communication or social features for large, global, or youth audiences.
• Familiarity with cross-platform (mobile, console, desktop) product development.