Principal Engineer Jobs in San Mateo, CA

As a Principal Security Software Engineer on the Production IAM team, you will set the technical direction for how identity and access work across Roblox's production infrastructure, from the mTLS-based identity that services use to authenticate to one another, to the privileged access controls that govern how engineers reach production. The team is accountable for Roblox's machine and workload identity platform, its centralized authorization engine, its production access management platform, production PKI and certificate lifecycle, and just-in-time privileged access for engineers. As an individual contributor in Production IAM, you will define multi-year strategy, drive alignment across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and personally build the hardest parts of these systems. As AI agents become first-class actors in production, you will also help pioneer how they get identity, prove who they are, and receive safely-scoped access.

You will

• Lead the architecture for production identity and access. Define and evolve the end-to-end design for machine, workload, human, and AI-agent identity across our hybrid on-prem and cloud fleet, making secure access invisible when it can be and intuitive when it needs attention.
• Drive mTLS and workload identity to full production enforcement. Lead the technical strategy for our SPIFFE/SPIRE-based identity platform, service-mesh integration, managed service accounts, and certificate issuance, storage, and rotation.
• Advance just-in-time, least-privilege access for engineers. Architect just-in-time, least-privilege, and break-glass access to production, replacing static, long-lived credentials with short-lived, auditable access that stays reliable even during dependency or identity-provider outages.
• Evolve the centralized authorization engine and a secure golden path. Mature our centralized authorization engine and the access-control models behind it (RBAC/ABAC and risk-based access) so decisions are consistent, fine-grained, and testable.
• Pioneer identity and access for AI agents. Define how agents obtain credentials, receive scoped permissions, and have their sessions managed across their lifecycle, setting the patterns for agentic identity at Roblox..
• Lead across the org and raise the bar. Author RFCs and multi-year roadmaps, align stakeholders across Roblox Platform, mentor senior and staff engineers, and raise the technical bar through design review, on-call ownership, and hiring.

You have

• 8+ years of relevant professional experience building scalable, distributed backend systems, with a track record of driving architecture end to end.
• Deep expertise in identity and access management — authentication, authorization, and access-control models such as RBAC, ABAC, or risk-based access control.
• Hands-on experience with several of: PKI and certificate/key lifecycle management, mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE or comparable workload-identity systems, service mesh, secret management (e.g., Vault), and privileged access management (PAM).
• Proficiency in at least one systems language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, Python, or C# .NET, and a habit of building systems rather than only configuring vendor tools.
• Experience leading the technical work of other engineers — setting direction across teams, writing influential design docs, and mentoring senior talent.
• AI fluency: you use AI tools in your daily workflow, understand LLM capabilities and limitations, and can reason about what it means to give an AI agent an identity and permissions.
• A Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar technical field.

You are

• A systems thinker. You reason about failure modes, blast radius, and reliability, and you design access that stays secure and available even when dependencies fail.
• Security-minded and pragmatic. You are passionate about least privilege and zero trust, but you optimize for the Builder experience and adoption, not controls for their own sake.
• A force multiplier. You make the engineers and teams around you better through mentorship, clear writing, and high-quality technical leadership.
• A strong communicator. You translate deep technical tradeoffs for both engineers and executives, and you build alignment across organizational boundaries.
• Bar-raising and hands-on. You still love to build, and you set the standard for engineering quality on the hardest problems.