PhD Opportunities at Roblox
Drive global production with deep, groundbreaking research.
Explore our PhD pathways
We offer full-time and temporary collaboration opportunities. Your project will focus on solving the hardest problems at scale with top researches and engineers.
PhD internships opportunities
The PhD Internship Program is designed for candidates pursuing PhD degrees to work on high-value strategic initiatives with clear deliverables and potential intellectual property contributions over a 12 or 16 week internship.
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Full-time roles
Our full-time opportunities offer the chance to solve unique technical challenges at scale and shape the future of human interaction.
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Our Teams and Research Areas
We're advancing state-of-the-art generative AI, computer vision, real-time graphics, and high-concurrency distributed systems to power our immersive gaming platform and creation studio. Our PhD engineers and researchers tackle hard, open problems across 3D foundation models, neural rendering, and spatial intelligence. From causal inference to bare-metal infrastructure, their work builds a more capable, civil platform. By pairing academic rigor with live global production, our research directly powers our platform while contributing peer-reviewed work to top-tier venues. Learn more in our Research and Publications, or explore our teams and their work below.
Foundation AI
Our Foundation AI team pioneers generative technology, transforming how real-time 3D content and virtual worlds are created for hundreds of millions of users. We build and train state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models, from Roblox Cube, our production 3D generative model enabling text-to-3D asset and world creation, to our 14B-parameter Video World Model for Roblox Reality.
Growth and Discovery
‘What should I play next?’ We design the recommendation and retrieval architecture that connects players to the right experiences across Roblox's catalog of millions of user-generated experiences. Our research spans large-scale neural retrieval and candidate ranking, LLM-powered semantic search, graph learning, and session-based personalization to solve fundamental discovery challenges on one of the largest real-time recommendation surfaces in the world.
Ads and Brands
We’re building an advertising platform where brands don't interrupt your game, they become part of it. By designing ML systems to optimize ad serving technology, measurement systems, monetization layers, and audience segmentation, we’re rethinking how sponsored content reaches the right users at the right time. We’re tackling open problems in mechanism design, constrained optimization, and causal inference so Fortune 500s and small businesses alike can reach their audience.
Safety
Operating at the intersection of real-time AI and platform trust, our team builds and deploys ultra-low-latency ML systems that evaluate images, text, voice, and 3D assets within billions of daily interactions. Tackling open problems in adversarial machine learning and proactive moderation, our research spans multimodal content understanding, real-time NLP for harm detection, computer vision for visual safety, and child-directed content classification at 100K+ QPS.
Economy
We architect the machine learning and econometric systems powering our virtual marketplace. We focus on fraud detection, dynamic pricing models, personalization, and ecosystem health across billions of annual transactions. This team offers a rich research environment for PhDs interested in applied mechanism design, empirical economics, causal inference, and large-scale anomaly detection where virtual commerce translates directly to real-world creator livelihoods (totaling $1.5B in 2025).
Creator
We’re ushering Roblox Studio into the agentic era, empowering our global community of creators to build, publish, and monetize their games more rapidly than ever before. By applying generative AI and NLP to autonomously write code, run tests, and generate 3D assets, we’re making professional game creation accessible to everyone. For PhDs, this work offers a unique research landscape at the hard intersection of code generation, multimodal AI, and human-computer interaction (HCI).
Engine
Our Engine simulates complex physics, renders 3D worlds at 60 FPS, animates characters, and safeguards hundreds of millions of players worldwide. This is deep systems work, tackling problems across geometry processing, motion diffusion models, neural rendering, and scalable distributed simulation. It’s thanks to the technical rigor of our engineers that our code runs in mere milliseconds for millions of concurrent users on devices across the spectrum, everything from a budget Android phone to a high-end PC.
Data Science
Data Science at Roblox is embedded across our teams, applying rigorous methodology and cutting-edge science to solve complex, platform-wide ecosystem problems: causal inference, experimentation, machine learning, AI evaluation, and applied statistics across trillions of daily analytic events. We’re translating massive-scale signals into insights that drive product decisions and long-term platform health.
Infrastructure
Powering the foundation of Roblox, we ensure the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of a platform that serves 100M+ users. Because public cloud infrastructure cannot natively accommodate our real-time throughput and latency constraints, we design custom systems from the metal up. We own everything running beneath the surface, including computing clusters, databases, networking, and the tools thousands of Roblox engineers use daily.
PhD Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs: PhD Careers at Roblox
Does the company encourage or support publishing research papers at major conferences?
On a case by case basis, we encourage Builders to publish at top-tier venues including NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, SIGGRAGH, ACL, and more. We also release open-source models and datasets — like Cube, our foundation model for 3D intelligence — because we believe great research should benefit the broader community. Publishing is a valued part of how we attract world-class talent and contribute to the field.
What professional development and continuous learning opportunities are available for employees looking to grow within the team?
We support researchers and engineers in a culture that encourages experimentation and publication. You'll work alongside some of the best minds in AI and have the resources — compute, data, and scope — to pursue high-impact problems. We offer mentorship, internal tech talks, and clear pathways to grow your career.
Do I need to be enrolled as a PhD student to be eligible for a PhD internship?
Our PhD Internship Program is designed for candidates who possess or are pursuing a PhD. If you're pursuing your doctorate and looking to apply your research to real-world problems at a massive scale, we'd love to hear from you.
Who will support me during my internship?
In addition to your teammates across functions, you'll have three dedicated champions in your corner. Your Manager will scope your project, guide your onboarding and project plan, and provide day-to-day support. You’ll be partnered with a Mentor who can offer hands-on support, connection with company-wide networking and events, and help navigating your new role. And, a consistent voice through your journey, your Talent Business Partner will conduct regular check-ins and make sure you're set up for success.
What programming is available for PhD interns?
During the internship, we’ll host programming covering:
- Social & Networking — Monthly dinners and focus-area-specific technical lunches to connect with leaders and peers across the PhD cohort.
- Professional Development — Presentation coaching and the PhD Poster Showcase, where you'll create and present a conference-style poster summarizing your project to the business.
- IP & Innovation — Dedicated sessions with IP Counsel and patent filing assistance, so you can navigate the intersection of research and corporate innovation.