Jobs / United States / Roblox Corporation
Principal/Senior Machine Learning Scientist - Search and Discovery
Roblox Corporation · 🇺🇸 San Mateo, CA, United States
Sponsorship verdict
Sponsorship possible
One solid signal, not two — worth applying, and worth asking about sponsorship early.
- Employer is on a government sponsor recordThe US Department of Labor certified 197 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 48 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
- The posting doesn’t mention sponsorshipSilence isn’t a refusal — ask the recruiter before investing much time.
- No salary bar for this routeH-1B has no fixed salary bar: the employer must pay at least the prevailing wage for the role and area. Cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level. Source: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/29/2025-23853/weighted-selection-process-for-registrants-and-petitioners-seeking-to-file-cap-subject-h-1b, rules effective 2026-02-27.
- What Roblox Corporation paid sponsored hires in similar roles25 certified filings for “Senior Data Scientist” (Data Scientists) in CA: $209k–$301k, median $249k. Most were filed at wage level IV (44%) — 4 lottery entries, ≈61% projected selection odds for cap-subject employers. Source: US Department of Labor LCA disclosure data (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026).
- Confirmed live todayWhen a source last listed this job as open.
US H-1B: cap-subject employers enter a lottery weighted by wage level — Level I gets 1 entry, Level IV gets 4 (DHS projected selection odds ≈15% at Level I to ≈61% at Level IV). Universities and non-profit research employers are cap-exempt. The $100,000 fee for new petitions from abroad is currently blocked by a court order (appeal pending).
A verdict summarises public evidence; it is not legal advice and never a guarantee — the employer and the immigration authority decide. Sign in to factor in where you can already work.
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Sponsor Radar — Roblox Corporation
The US Department of Labor certified 197 H-1B/E-3 labor condition applications for this employer between Oct 2025 and Jun 2026 (latest Jun 2026) — the step every H-1B hire needs first. USCIS also records 48 H-1B approvals in FY2023. Source: LCA disclosure data (US Department of Labor (OFLC)).
Past sponsorship or register membership never guarantees sponsorship for this vacancy or for you. Full Sponsor Radar for Roblox Corporation →
About the role
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. With Roblox’s daily active users growing at a record pace, we are seeking experienced machine learning researchers who thrive on solving complex challenges and designing scalable, ground breaking solutions. In this role, you will innovate on LLMs, VLMs, autoregressive models, or other large models for user understanding, content understanding, recommendation, and agentic search. Your work will lay the foundation for personalizing user experiences, enhancing engagement and retention, and driving growth within the creator ecosystem. In search and discovery, you will contribute to the core systems that enable users to discover and interact with experiences across Roblox. On Search, that work spans the end-to-end user search journey, covering query suggestions, autocomplete, and retrieval and ranking. These systems drive exploration and engagement across all surfaces, helping users find relevant and exciting content. Looking ahead, our team aims to innovate further by developing auto-generated summaries, images, and videos from experience content to improve discoverability and inspire user exploration. Our mission is to connect a billion users with the best content and connections at the right time, tackling diverse challenges in advertising, search, and discovery at an unprecedented scale. Join us and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Roblox’s search and discovery. You Will: • Design and implement the machine learning solutions that power agentic search and discovery systems to drive Roblox content distribution. • Design and implement large scale recommendation models. • In this role, you will innovate on LLMs, VLMs, autoregressive models, or other large models for query understanding, user understanding, content understanding, recommendation, and agentic search. • Design eval and post-training loops - SFT, preference optimization, and RL - for ranking, query understanding, and agentic systems. • Balance researching new technologies with a practical approach to integrate research efforts into the Roblox products. • Collaborate with other teams within Roblox to make sure we are building products with a community first approach. • Communicate with the industry and communities where applicable and be ambassador for Roblox. You have: • You have 7+ (for principal) or 4+ (for senior) years of experience designing and building scalable machine learning solutions. Experienced with transformer based model training, inference, and product integration. Break down product requirements into iterative deliverable stages. • Depth in recommendation, search retrieval and ranking, or LLM post-training and agentic systems is a plus. • You have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline or equivalent experience. • You have initiated and facilitated challenging technical decisions across multiple teams and organizations. • While deeply technical, you always start with the needs of the user, whether they are Roblox users or internal engineers.