Senior / Principal Data Scientist, Matchmaking

WHY DATA SCIENCE & ANALYTICS? The Data Science & Analytics organization's mission is to increase our speed, frequency and acumen of making decisions at scale by instilling a data-influenced approach to building products. We cover a wide area of the data spectrum including analytical data engineering, product analytics, experimentation, causal inference, statistical modeling and machine learning. Aligned and partnering with product verticals, we use this extensive tool belt to discover new opportunities and unmet use cases, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build data products and measure impact on our community of players and developers. WHY MATCHMAKING? Every day, millions of players explore immersive worlds created by our global community. Our mission is to optimize these connections at an unprecedented scale - matching each player to the most engaging experience, in real time, across a dynamic global ecosystem. As a Senior/Principal Data Scientist on the Matchmaking team, you'll help shape the future of how our community discovers, connects, and plays together, solving some of the most challenging optimization and systems problems in the industry. Matchmaking is the foundational system that connects millions of users to tens of thousands of experiences across our global platform infrastructure. You'll partner with engineers, infrastructure teams, and product leaders to solve some of the most complex optimization problems in the industry. Your work will span from low-level resource allocation algorithms to high-level capacity planning strategies. You will define KPIs and measure the impact of matchmaking improvements while discovering optimization opportunities through advanced analytics, modeling, and experimentation. This role sits at the intersection of cutting-edge operations research, large-scale systems engineering, and user experience optimization. You Will:

• Design and optimize large-scale matching algorithms to connect millions of users with thousands of experiences in real time.
• Define and track matchmaking performance metrics that directly improve user satisfaction and system efficiency.
• Build scalable monitoring and analytics systems for continuous evaluation and root cause analysis.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to implement high-performance, low-latency matchmaking pipelines.
• Develop and deploy advanced optimization models using state-of-the-art mathematical frameworks and large-scale telemetry data.
• Validate and iterate on improvements through rigorous experimentation and causal inference.
• Collaborate with our developer community to create transparent and customizable matchmaking solutions that empower creators.
• Influence platform strategy and contribute as a technical thought leader to advance Roblox's global ecosystem.

You Have:

• Advanced Degree and/or PhD in Operations Research, Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Industrial Engineering, or other related quantitative fields
• 6+ years of relevant industry experience with marketplace optimization, auction systems, or large-scale matching platforms (e.g., ride-sharing, ad exchanges, trading systems)
• Strong optimization systems experience including mathematical modeling, solver integration, and production deployment of marketplace or allocation algorithms
• Demonstrated ability to drive optimization initiatives as an individual contributor and technical thought leader
• Experience with real-time bidding, dynamic pricing, or resource allocation systems in high-throughput environments
• Experience collaborating with Infrastructure teams to optimize system performance and resource utilization (a plus)
• Ability to communicate optimization results and algorithmic insights to influence engineering teams and business stakeholders

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