By Erica Snow, Senior Director, People Science, Learning, and Early Career
Published Oct 13, 2026
Some people wait five years to ship a project to a hundred million users. At Roblox, that can happen in the first month. Delivering that kind of impact requires genuine support, which is why we invest heavily in builders’ journeys from the start, with unique skills-focused assessments that give everyone an equal shot and dedicated support before day one.
My background is in cognitive science, with a PhD focused on how people learn and demonstrate capability in game-based environments. That research shaped a belief I carry into everything I do at Roblox: the best indicators of someone's potential don’t always appear on paper. What matters is what a person can do, how they think, and whether they're given the right environment to do their best work. That conviction is what drives how our team designs our early career programs. Here's what that actually looks like:
The Builder Experience
At Roblox, the experience is the same whether builders are two weeks in or two years in: they own what they build, and what they build reaches people.
With a few thousand builders serving over a hundred million users, their contributions are visible and their work moves the product. The scale of what ships here is real. Our infrastructure team scaled Roblox's Kafka platform to handleover 18 trillion messages a day, our safety team built and open-sourced machine learning models now used across the industry through theROOST Model Community, and our product and engineering teams shipped Build, enabling prompt-to-game creation directly inside the Roblox app.
Early career builders ship work at that same scale. Previously, one of our early career hires built a machine learning model that identifies fake accounts by learning the unique patterns in how real users type. The model analyzes actual user behavior to create a signature distinct enough to detect when someone is operating under a different account. Getting it to production meant scoping the architecture, validating the approach through rigorous testing, and building out the full training and monitoring pipeline. The result replaced a legacy system, doubled precision in catching alternate accounts, and directly contributed to identifying and removing bad actors from the platform.
Every experience builders gain at Roblox stays with them. We solve problems at the cross-section of real-time systems, AI, creator economies, and consumer-scale tech. We also encourage early career hires to explore different teams and functions as they grow. The work we do here carries weight.
How Does Roblox Support Early Career Development?
Structured mentorship from day one
Mentorship at Roblox is structured and established before builders even start. Every intern and new grad is paired with a dedicated mentor and manager. Our mentors provide hands-on support and help builders navigate their new role, while managers scopes the work, guide them onboarding, and give direct feedback throughout the program. The relationship goes beyond answering questions. As engineer Neil Kamdar puts it: "Being a SWE intern isn't just lines of code but also being proactive with sharing risks and tradeoffs, improving systems, and building trust. I try to monitor that growth in an early career hire in my day-to-day and work with them to feel more comfortable doing so."
The mentorship here is also about building confidence, not just capability. Engineer Richard Liu describes his approach: "I reemphasized that they should feel empowered to trust their own judgment and experience for various design decisions, and not be afraid to miss the right answer, because there often wouldn't be just one."
A built-in community
Building community here happens fast, and most of it is by design. Throughout our program, we offer happy hours, social events, and networking opportunities that connect early career builders across the company. An early career builder said it best themselves: "Everyone is really nice and I feel like my work actually matters and has an impact, even though I'm a junior employee." Beyond the cohort experience, Roblox has a range of affinity groups where employees connect with others who share similar backgrounds, identities, and interests.
Visibility with senior leadership
Talks, hackathons, and demo days are built into the calendar throughout our programs, and senior leaders attend these not just to present, but to actively engage with the work. Beyond these events, early career employees have direct access to leadership through fireside chats and open Q&A sessions, so no one is shipping work in a silo. Builders get to understand the bigger picture, ask questions about where the company is headed, and see how their work connects to what Roblox is building at scale. For PhD interns specifically, this also includes a conference-style poster showcase and dedicated sessions with IP counsel on patent filing and innovation. Across all programs, visibility isn't an afterthought, it's built in.
Explore our Pathways
Most early career hiring focuses on credentials. At Roblox, we focus on builders’ capabilities. Our People Science team has spent years studying what actually predicts success at Roblox and built our evaluations around those findings. The goal is a process that's consistent, rigorous, and gives every candidate a genuine shot based on what they can do, not just where they've been. Across all of our programs, we're looking for the same thing: people who are sharp, motivated, and ready to take ownership.
Internships
Roblox internships are built around one thing: putting early career talent in a position to do work that matters. Interns join each summer across software engineering, AI/ML, product design, and product management, and each intern owns a project from start to finish over the course of the summer. Interns scope it, build it, and ship it to a platform used by hundreds of millions of people, all before they head back to school. At the end of the program, they present what they’ve built at a demo day attended by senior leaders across the company. The work doesn't sit in a sandbox waiting for someone else to take it forward. We take it into production.
One early career employee captured the experience well: "I get the privilege of working on systems that affect hundreds of millions of users in a positive way. I feel responsible for our customers, and I feel that they are relying on me to improve their experience. That reliance makes me feel impactful and valued."
Full-Time Early Career Roles
Starting a career at Roblox means starting with ownership. Early career hires take on real projects, make meaningful decisions, and ship work at a scale most engineers don't encounter until years into their careers. The problems are harder, the stakes are real, and the expectation is that builders rise to meet them with the support of a team that's genuinely invested in their growth.
Roblox is growing quickly, which means there's always more to build and more room to move. Early career hires are actively encouraged to explore different teams and functions over time, whether that means going deeper in their craft or pivoting toward something new. The path isn't fixed, and the company is big enough to support wherever it leads. As one early career engineer put it: "I like that I’m able to make an impact and work on things a normal junior SWE wouldn’t be able to do at other tech companies."
PhD Opportunities
At Roblox, research rigor and production scale exist in the same role. The work builders do here contributes to peer-reviewed research at top-tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, SIGGRAPH, and ACL, while shipping directly to one of the largest consumer platforms in the world.
Our PhD engineers and researchers work on hard open problems across foundation AI, safety, growth and discovery, economy, and infrastructure, among others. That includes building state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models like Roblox Cube for text-to-3D creation, deploying ML systems that evaluate billions of daily interactions in real time, and designing the recommendation architecture that connects players to experiences across one of the largest real-time recommendation surfaces in the world.
During internships, they present their work in a conference-style PhD Poster Showcase, get sessions with IP counsel on patent filing, and connect with the broader PhD cohort through technical lunches and networking events. Full-time PhD roles offer the same research environment with longer runway to go deeper.
Community Apprenticeship
Nobody understands this platform better than the people who've spent years building on it. The Community Apprenticeship Program is a 12-week paid opportunity open to Roblox creators and developers. No degree enrollment required. The main qualification is a creator passionate about building tools that make the platform better. Apprentices are aligned to our Creator or Engine teams, working on Lua-focused projects that contribute to the libraries, interfaces, and creator tooling used by millions of developers daily. The voice of apprentices shapes the tools the community actually uses.
The people who've been through it describe an experience that tends to come full circle. Engineering Manager Wenqi Yao has seen it firsthand: "Our community is wildly talented and we'd love to see more creators join this program. The apprentice on our team was so passionate about improving the platform that they ended up working with designers to propose and ship features completely outside their original project scope." A past apprentice put it simply: "I got to learn how the sausage gets made, and work directly with high-level engineers to build new features that actually benefit the community."
Ready to Build at Scale?
Roblox is on a path to reach a billion users. Our platform keeps expanding, and there's meaningful work across every function for people who want to grow with us. Our teams work on problems that scale real-time engagement, help protect our global community, and push the boundaries of what's possible in game creation. Whether talent joins as an intern or full-time hire, they’re working on those problems too, across software engineering, AI science, machine learning engineering, product design, product management and more. We're looking for sharp, curious people who want to do hard things, and we've built our hiring process to find them regardless of where they went to school or what their background looks like.
At Roblox, contributions reach people at scale and our early career development is taken seriously from the beginning. Explore our Early Career site for opportunities and more information.
