Principal Engineer Jobs in San Mateo, CA
Principal Engineer jobs in San Mateo are concentrated in the downtown core, Hillsdale, and the Bay Meadows tech corridor, driven by fintech, enterprise software, and SaaS companies. Employers hiring right now include Roblox and Neurophos. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.
At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
Roblox's Object Store team is building the in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform that underpins every large-object workload at Roblox — assets, media, analytics, backups, and machine learning datasets — at exabyte scale, trillions of objects, and terabytes per second of throughput. We build and run it ourselves on bare metal in our own data centers, replacing cloud object storage with a platform we control end to end — down to the hardware. As a principal engineer on the Object Store team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch the capabilities that keep this platform durable, fast, and efficient at global scale, and set the technical direction for where it goes next. You will report to the Engineering Manager for Storage.
You will:
- Design and build the object store — S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, multi-tenancy and isolation.
- Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
- Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
- Run the bare-metal fleet at scale — cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, hardware and capacity planning.
- Profile and optimize critical data paths; drive down tail latency and cost per byte.
- Establish engineering best practices — design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives — targeting 4+ 9s.
- Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
- Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.
You have:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage — object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems — at petabyte scale or beyond.
- Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production: data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale. Depth operating these systems matters more here than contributing to their internals.
- Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
- Deep understanding of durability and replication — erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, blast-radius containment.
- Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
- Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
- Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.
- Bonus: upstream contributions to open-source storage projects; S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.
For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators.
At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there.
A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.
Roblox's Object Store team is building the in-house, multi-tenant object storage platform that underpins every large-object workload at Roblox — assets, media, analytics, backups, and machine learning datasets — at exabyte scale, trillions of objects, and terabytes per second of throughput. We build and run it ourselves on bare metal in our own data centers, replacing cloud object storage with a platform we control end to end — down to the hardware. As a principal engineer on the Object Store team, you will shape the architecture, build and launch the capabilities that keep this platform durable, fast, and efficient at global scale, and set the technical direction for where it goes next. You will report to the Engineering Manager for Storage.
You will:
- Design and build the object store — S3-compatible gateway, metadata and indexing, data placement and tiering, multi-tenancy and isolation.
- Own the technical strategy: multi-year architecture, build-vs-buy calls, and the migration off cloud object storage.
- Evolve the control plane for elastic scaling, autonomous healing, self-service provisioning, and zero-downtime tenant moves.
- Run the bare-metal fleet at scale — cluster lifecycle, upgrades, rebalancing, failure domains, hardware and capacity planning.
- Profile and optimize critical data paths; drive down tail latency and cost per byte.
- Establish engineering best practices — design reviews, benchmarks, failure drills, post-incident retrospectives — targeting 4+ 9s.
- Automate everything: testing, CI/CD, rollout safety, observability, autoscaling.
- Mentor engineers and partner cross-functionally with security, analytics, and product teams.
You have:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering or a relevant field
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage — object stores, blob stores, or distributed file systems — at petabyte scale or beyond.
- Hands-on experience running an object storage platform in production: data placement and rebalancing, erasure coding, cluster tuning, and upgrades at scale. Depth operating these systems matters more here than contributing to their internals.
- Strong skills in C++, Go, or Rust.
- Deep understanding of durability and replication — erasure coding, geo-replication, consistency trade-offs, blast-radius containment.
- Proven success shipping high-throughput, low-latency services on bare-metal, on-prem fleets with strong observability.
- Ability to turn ambiguous requirements into a clear roadmap and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
- Passion for automation, rigorous testing, and data-driven decisions.
- Bonus: upstream contributions to open-source storage projects; S3 API compatibility at scale, NVMe/HDD tiering, or migrating large workloads off public-cloud object storage.
For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits as described on this page.
Roles that are based in an office are onsite Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with optional presence on Monday and Friday (unless otherwise noted).
Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Roblox also provides reasonable accommodations to candidates with qualifying disabilities or religious beliefs during the recruiting process.
For US based roles only, please note the Company may not be able to employ candidates for this role who have United States work authorization related to certain U.S. visa categories, or support future H-1B sponsorship at this time.
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Who's Hiring
Principal Engineer Jobs in San Mateo: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a principal engineer job in San Mateo?
Focus your search on San Mateo's fintech, enterprise software, and SaaS employers, which generate the most principal engineer openings locally. The Bay Meadows district and downtown core are where most tech offices cluster. Candidates who demonstrate experience leading large-scale system design and cross-functional engineering teams stand out, as San Mateo employers at this level expect both deep technical ownership and the ability to drive architectural decisions across product and engineering.
Which companies hire principal engineers in San Mateo?
San Mateo principal engineer roles are posted by Roblox and Neurophos and others right now, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of September 2026. San Mateo's employer base skews toward mid-size and growth-stage technology companies alongside established financial services firms with significant engineering functions.
Are there remote principal engineer jobs in San Mateo?
Yes, though availability depends on the role, as principal engineer positions involving hands-on infrastructure or on-site collaboration tend to require in-person presence while product and platform architecture roles often allow remote or hybrid arrangements. About 67% of principal engineer openings tied to San Mateo are remote or hybrid as of September 2026, with most flexibility concentrated in software platform and data engineering roles at San Mateo's tech-focused employers.
How can I get a principal engineer job in San Mateo with little or no experience?
The most realistic path into a principal engineer role in San Mateo is moving through a senior engineer or staff engineer position at one of the city's fintech or SaaS companies, where internal promotions into principal-level roles are common. Entry-level candidates should target associate or mid-level engineer roles at San Mateo's growth-stage startups in Bay Meadows or the downtown corridor, build a portfolio of system design work, and seek out mentorship programs within larger local technology organizations to accelerate the path to principal-level responsibility.
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