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Research Scientist

Roblox is bringing the world together through shared online experiences. Our platform enables people to imagine, create, and interact within entirely user-generated worlds that are linked through consistent player personas to form a metaverse.

We're a fast-growing platform to help anyone teach themselves how to model, animate, code, publish, and monetize any multiplayer experience they envision. It reaches hundreds of millions of players across the globe, in millions of experiences, on game consoles, phones, computers, and in VR. Because Roblox's revenue arises from its virtual economy, its goals are aligned with the users': ensuring civility and privacy, empowering accessible content creation, and fostering expression of identity.

With around 1000 employees and a target of 10 researchers, we rely on constant innovation to support a disproportionately large amount of content and players. This also means that we are a large enough company to achieve our vision and a great work environment, but still small enough that each scientist can have tremendous impact on the product, player community, and culture. This is an opportunity to build the next generation of social and computing interfaces and build the next world-class fundamental research lab.

Roblox presents a tremendous international laboratory for experiments at scale with users, data, client devices, and servers. We're looking for experts in the following technical areas:

• Distributed Systems, focussed on scaling real-time interactive experiences to tens of thousands of players in the same fully-simulated environment
• Voice and Natural Language Processing, focussed on applying NLP, machine learning, and signal processing techniques for chat moderation, voice avatars, latency and bandwidth minimization, real-time natural-language translation, quality, Text-to-Speech (TTS)/Speech-to-Text (STT), accessibility, and 3D audio
• Content Creation, to accelerate game and asset creation for experts and make it approachable for novices across 3D shapes, mechanical parts, narrative & non-player character artificial intelligence, lighting rigs, material synthesis, and code-less programming.

Senior research scientists are encouraged to engage with local universities. For example, by participating in university reading and research groups, delivering guest lectures or occasional full courses, or holding an academic title. They may spend up to 10% time in approved, compensated academic appointments.

You:

• Are a recognized expert in the community for your domain
• Identify and frame new research challenges for the field
• Publish multiple peer-reviewed articles in top-tier venues every year
• Seek societal impact and real-world validation for your work by driving product direction
• Have worked in, consulted for, or collaborated with industry R&D groups
• Regularly collaborate with and mentor graduate students
• Collaborate with academic peers in your field
• Serve on conference programme committees
• Frequently present research at conferences and invited university talks
• Have a Ph.D. or equivalent research experience in any field
• Are proficient in C++ and Python and several libraries for your domain
• Have equivalent experience to a Masters degree in Computer Science systems
• Use and contribute to open source and data

You Will:

• Work closely with engineers to identify new 3-5 year research opportunities and frame constraints on solutions
• Solve fundamental challenges important to Roblox's vision and business
• Recruit and mentor graduate interns
• Mentor or manage junior scientists and engineers
• Establish collaborations with leading faculty around the world
• Perform hands-on research, including participating in data collection and programming for experiments and prototypes
• Publish and present research findings in top-tier peer-reviewed venues
• Patent inventions
• Transfer technology into the product by shepherding it through engineering
• Advise product groups on advances across the field