Principal Economist / Scientist

Key Skills

Apache Airflow, Apache Flink, Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Google BigQuery, Python Programming, R Programming, Spark Core, SQL

Job Description

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 economics at Roblox?

Our vision is to create the most vibrant UGC virtual economy. We currently operate the largest marketplace of virtual items, and are the platform that hosts tens of thousands of games and social experiences. We seek to enable and advance this existing economy with economic rigor, leveraging expertise from market design, auction theory, price theory, structural IO, and reduced form causal methods, built into our governance model, and directly incorporated in community tools. In addition, we face several macroeconomic questions around exchange rates, localized pricing, and vision for monetary policy.

In this role, you will be a foundational member of the Economy Data Science & Analytics (DSA) team working in close partnership with strategic leaders in Product, Engineering, and Finance. We are early, and seek an economics expert to help design this vision and execute the innovation to achieve it.

You Will:

• Help advance data-informed decision making through economic theory and scientific rigor

• Create and motivate metrics reflective of first-principles, and use them to advance user experience and marketplace health

• Accelerate product development through your understanding of the underlying data and your ability to partner with product and technical leaders to provide insights

• Design science roadmaps and experimentation agendas to determine success of product feature launches

• Access raw data, and then transform it, and analyze it in a compelling way--all using a custom analytics tool kit built from state-of-the-art open-source libraries

You Have:

• PhD in Economics, Statistics, Applied Math, Physics, or other technical field

• 10+ years of industry or academic experience in data science, economics, analytics, or machine learning engineering

• 5+ years of experience using scripting languages (Python, R), and big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark and Airflow

• Additional experience, including research, in your area of economics speciality a plus

• Broader experience applying economic theory to craft and advance marketplaces a plus

• Experience in varied environments and track record of simplifying complex and ambiguous problems plus

You Are:

• Expert in a specialized economics area: multi-sided platform economics, mechanism design, empirical industrial organization, causal inference, or macroeconomic policy

• Experienced in applying economic theory to real marketplaces, deriving strategic insights, and advancing business objectives

• Proficient in data and applied methodologies. You use cutting-edge techniques (or develop new ones) to extract value and drive insights for strategic topics.

• A strong communicator. You understand that analysis must be presented in meaningful ways and lead spirited discussions about the findings. You can explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences and discuss appropriate tradeoffs.

• Passionate about developing other technical talent. You are motivated to share your expertise and develop other team members while leading your own space.

• Expert in data transformation and programming, using languages including Python, R, and SQL. You are experienced in automating efforts and crunching massive volumes of data using big data frameworks such as Spark, Hadoop or Flink.

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.

Annual Salary Range

$359,170—$415,750 USD

You’ll Love:

• Industry-leading compensation package
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• A rewarding 401k program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Roflex - Flexible and supportive work policy
• Roblox Admin badge for your avatar
• At Roblox HQ:
• Free catered lunches five times a week and several fully stocked kitchens with unlimited snacks
• Onsite fitness center and fitness program credit
• Annual CalTrain Go Pass