Working at Roblox: Meet Jan Berktold

Jan is a Tech Lead and Principal Software Engineer on the Platform team at Roblox. Prior to joining, Jan built experiences on the Roblox platform as a third-party developer.

Describe your team’s role here at Roblox.

The Storage Platform provides persistent storage to all engineering teams at Roblox and ultimately powers the Roblox platform. We provide managed offerings to make it easy for our engineers to build features that store data while ensuring that said offerings are reliable and performant, and, most importantly, elevate Roblox’s user experience.

What is one of the most interesting aspects about working on your team at Roblox?

Our vision is to create a platform where people can come together within millions of 3D experiences to learn, work, play, create, and socialize. Because we connect users from all around the world, building the platform powering the experiences can be challenging—especially in regards to storage.

Recently, we’ve begun looking at deploying our services in our data centers across continents for reliability, performance, and data compliance reasons. This is pushing us to reimagine how we approach all of our persistent data. Looking forward, we’ll have to tackle this large set of challenges by innovating and iterating over the next couple of years.

How is your experience on the team at Roblox different from other roles you’ve had?

I started learning about software development as a third-party developer building experiences on the Roblox platform during high school. When I went on to intern for Roblox and ultimately join as an engineer, the passion and product-focus of all employees—whether they directly interacted with community members on a daily basis or worked behind the scenes to support the vast infrastructure that enables Roblox to operate—made an impression and convinced me to stick around.

The depth of our platform allows us to innovate in a variety of different areas—distributed storage, rendering, content safety, even physics. This has helped my personal growth and professional learning, both within and beyond my team’s explicit focus.

What’s one thing you love about the culture at Roblox?

I love the values-aligned culture and thoughtfulness of the people that I work with every day. Everybody owns and drives their own piece of the Roblox puzzle and gaps that do not yet have an assigned owner are quickly picked up. I appreciate that we all work together to build a better experience for the community, regardless of how our work ultimately touches the users.

Interested in joining the Platform team at Roblox? We’re always looking for new talent, so come check us out at corp.roblox.com/careers/ and see if there’s a role that’s right for you.