Principal Data Scientist - Safety
At a glance
Senior AI Research role at roblox. San Mateo · full-time · $274,000–$373,680 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build measures that show how much harmful content and behavior appears across the platform
- Create and check reference datasets for harmful user-created material and policy-violating behavior
- Analyze current and emerging threats, then advise product and engineering teams where to focus moderation resources
- Test new safety and enforcement features, using experiments and causal methods to assess their effects
- Turn findings into recommendations for leaders and partners, while aligning measurement work with ML and data engineering
What you bring
- At least ten years in data science, economics, analytics or machine learning engineering
- Seven or more years using Python or R alongside big-data querying and processing tools
- Experience building safety or moderation systems at scale and working with user-generated content platforms
- An advanced quantitative degree or doctorate, or equivalent study in a listed related field
Who this fits
This senior role suits a data scientist who can apply statistics and causal inference to ambiguous safety questions and guide cross-functional partners. The San Mateo office schedule calls for on-site work Tuesday through Thursday, with Monday and Friday optional. Certain U.S. visa-related work authorizations may affect eligibility, and future H-1B sponsorship may not be available.
From the employer
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.
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 CONTENT SAFETY?
Content safety and moderation are paramount to maintaining a positive, engaging, and trustworthy platform experience for our global community. In this role, you will apply your expertise in data science, statistics, and causal inference to strategically define, measure, and improve the detection and mitigation of harmful user-generated content and violative on-platform behaviors. Your focus will be on asset-based content across the platform - including games, avatars, and emerging in-game behaviors - by establishing reliable ground truth datasets and developing robust prevalence measurement methodologies. You will collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Legal, Policy, and Compliance teams, acting as the quantitative expert who guides our defensive strategy against evolving safety threats and ensures accountability and scalable solutions. This is a critical opportunity to build innovative detection systems, define what we measure, and prove the impact of our safety efforts.
YOU WILL:
- Establish and monitor robust prevalence measurement methodologies to accurately quantify the overall level of harmful content and behavior on the platform, providing the authoritative source of truth for organizational safety goals.
- Develop and validate comprehensive ground truth datasets for harmful UGC and violative on-platform behaviors, ensuring high quality and alignment with the latest platform policies.
- Deepen our understanding of violations by conducting exploratory analysis on current and emerging threat landscapes, providing data-backed recommendations on where Product and Engineering should strategically invest detection and moderation resources.
- Design, implement, and analyze sophisticated experiments for new moderation and safety enforcement features, communicating results to our primary partners in Product and Engineering to guide development, while also collaborating closely with Policy, Compliance, and Legal teams for full strategic alignment.
- Leverage advanced causal inference methodologies to accurately measure the effectiveness and potential systemic impacts of various safety initiatives on player experience and platform integrity.
- Communicate strategic insights and present recommendations to leadership and all cross-functional partners, translating complex statistical findings on prevalence, ground truth quality, and effectiveness into actionable strategies for Product, Engineering, Policy, Compliance, and Legal
- Partner with ML and Data Engineering teams to ensure model development, reporting, and detection systems are built on statistically sound ground truth and measurement frameworks.
YOU HAVE:
- 10+ years of industry experience in data science, economics, analytics, or machine learning engineering
- 7+ years of experience using scripting languages (Python, R), and big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark, and Airflow
- Knowledge of ML and Deep Learning either via formal training or industry experience
- Ability to apply creative first-principles reasoning to solve ambiguous problems
- Experience developing large-scale safety or moderation systems as well as experience with content platforms, specifically user-generated content
- Advanced Degree and/or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Applied Math, Economics, or other related quantitative fields
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.
Annual Salary Range$274,000—$373,680 USDRoles 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.