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Vice President, Engineering Apps

WHY ROBLOX?
Roblox is ushering in the next generation of entertainment, allowing people to imagine, create, and play together in immersive, user-generated worlds. We’re the one and only fastest-growing entertainment platform that lets anyone teach themselves how to code, publish, and monetize any experience imaginable—across any device—reaching millions of players across the globe.

The impact that you can have at Roblox is powerful. We’re looking for someone who’s eager to take on a meaningful role in the success of Roblox on a massive scale. Someone who takes play seriously, but also isn’t afraid to have some fun either. Someone who’s ready to take Roblox—and their career—to the next level. You should be excited about taking on a wide range of technical challenges including distributed systems, real time communication, 3D co-experience, massive data processing, social networking, rendering, or physics simulation.

In 2018, we were honored to be recognized as a Certified Great Place to Work®. We’ve fostered a company culture that empowers people to do the most defining work of their career in an environment that’s made up of the most passionate, team-oriented, visionary, crazy-smart people you’ll ever meet. Join the Roblox team where play rules and the possibilities are endless.

ABOUT THE ROLE
As the head of Apps Engineering, you are responsible for all player-facing functionality at Roblox outside of the game engine. Contained within the App are some of the biggest drivers of company and community success. Consider the following three examples. First, given our mission of Bringing the World Together through Play, our social experience is critical to the success of the platform. Today we support basic text chat on the platform and in games, yet we
have ambitions to create a much richer and more unique experience. Second, how we recommend new games to players is one of our most important, yet underdeveloped, drivers of company success. We have a huge opportunity to better understand our users and match them with compelling new experiences. Third, a huge part of Roblox’s success is meeting our players where they are, whether that is their desktop, mobile device, game console, or VR system. To do this we have developed a universal app framework that enables most application and UI code to be common and isolates platform specific components. The challenge is ensuring we can efficiently support new platforms while, at the same, time making the expressiveness and implementation speed in the common framework world-class.

This role reports directly to the CTO with an expected team size of 120+ by end of 2020.

COMPETENCIES

• Management experience with fast growing organizations and a track-record of both aggressively growing leaders from within, while recruiting aggressively to fill gaps when internal candidates are not a fit.
• Strong technical leadership and an ability to engage effectively with technical leaders and contribute to technical solutions.
• Product vision and an ability to collaborate with product management colleagues to ensure a phenomenal experience for the Roblox community, as we practically iterate towards an aggressive long-term vision.
• Scaling services that handle millions of qps with an eye to geographic scalability and reliability.
• Comfort with working through people and process gaps, and ability to fill those gaps in a way that is aligned with the fast-moving, self-organizing principles of Roblox.
• Flexible management style with a primary approach of coaching and enabling strong engineering teams, while at the same time being able to engage directly when urgency is needed or teams are stalled.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

• First and foremost, you’ll be part of the engineering leadership team, and work with the other VPs and the CTO to ensure we effectively keep up with the rapid growth at Roblox; Demonstrate through action that we value Community above Company above Team above Individual (a Roblox value).
• Grow the App team significantly while continuously raising our high bar for incoming talent.
• Deliver an incredible social experience incorporating multi-modal chat, voice, video, and 3D. Use this social experience to drive the appeal of Roblox to increasingly more mature and diverse demographics.
• Drive engagement of the platform through significant advances in user discovery of games and game recommendations.
• Develop a culture that balances rapid innovation on the product while taking the long view to ensure we minimize technical and product debt.