Roblox is a really hot pre-IPO unicorn, and lately they're hiring a lot, so a lot of candidates are interviewing there. I get it, a lot of people want in, but I have to complain a bit — the experience was, if anything, worse than others I've seen on this board. After the IPO the stock will probably pop, but long-term it's genuinely hard to say.
Phone screen 1: HM
The hiring manager was pretty nice, talked through my experience and asked questions, and my background matched the position well — it's Fraud Detection work, and it sounded like it would touch several kinds of modeling.
Phone screen 2: DS
Technical. Wrote SQL, two AB testing questions, briefly touched on modeling — the only modeling question was how to handle data imbalance, and that was it. The SQL wasn't the usual three OA questions, it was one case-when + join problem you could just solve outright. My guess is the OA got complained about so much they stopped using it.
Onsite:
I interviewed with an EM, a DS, the HM, a PM, and the DS Director.
The EM asked about experience working with the engineering team — felt fine.
The DS and HM rounds are where things started. First of all, a bunch of the DSs at Roblox came from Facebook, and these two happened to be ex-FB as well. I know FB's analytics org is very mature, but this position is about handling all kinds of payment fraud — kids stealing their parents' credit cards — and the JD had a lot of modeling-related questions in it. And then it turned out to basically be FB onsite questions verbatim... plus one about how you'd evaluate a "friend interaction" feature. I was kind of stunned. Fine, it doesn't match my actual position, but I get why they'd still ask this stuff, and luckily I'd prepared for it, so I think I answered reasonably well. Then the HM started talking to me about ads auctions. I asked if the role actually needs to work on ads, and the HM said no, they'd already found someone for that, just asking out of curiosity. I...
The DS Director round was Q&A — you just ask him questions. Pretty neutral, should be fine.
The PM round is where the real climax happened. A Senior PM Director who came over from Facebook — I have never met someone like this before. Right out of the gate: "I see you have a lot of experience in the finance industry, those are all very slow companies with bad tech, how do you convince me you can adapt to our pace?" I'm not adding any flourish here, that's literally the tone — disrespectful, just like that.
I couldn't hold it in at that point. Building on the infrastructure questions I'd been asked in earlier rounds, I told him our company's real-time model infrastructure is ten times better than his, okay. I just had to grit my teeth and explain it slowly. This guy had a dismissive look on his face the whole time, and on top of that he was pacing back and forth on camera, walking left and right while asking questions, clearly doing something else and not actually listening — seriously, who does that? He also said, pretty arrogantly, that he doesn't believe there's data out there that can solve the problem of kids stealing their parents' credit cards, and that you should just build a feature and be done with it. I had a question mark on my face — why don't you just go tell the DS Director to cancel this position, then? And since when does a PM who came from Facebook not believe in data and just makes up features off the top of his head? Anyway, from the moment this guy opened his mouth, the chemistry was just off — he had no regard for the person across from him, and no other round, however good, could make up for it.
I'll call him RS for short. In theory, based on other people's interview reports, you can appeal and ask for a different PM round, but looking at his background I decided to give up on that idea. His position is clearly very core — even if I switched to a different PM, they might still work under his org, so it feels like there's no escaping it. He's in charge of building all the money-related features, and most of Roblox's revenue ties back to him, which probably explains the personality and the attitude. The feature he's proudest of is exactly the thing I hate most about Roblox as a player: under his design, you open basically any Roblox game and nearly every button is trying to get you to pay. I'm not exaggerating — this level of monetization is heavier than Chinese domestic mobile games, heavier than the old classic pay-to-win game Zhengtu (Conquest Online), and by a lot. And the thing is, a lot of Roblox games are tiny in scope, and every little item, every small action, wants a few dollars out of you. It's popular with American teens partly because tastes are different, and partly because parents have money and are willing to drop a few bucks so their kid can buy a little in-game gun for some small game. Part of why this company has such a high valuation is that Tencent invested and it's preparing to enter the China market — with monetization this aggressive in these tiny games, if this actually took off in China I'd be genuinely shocked. Try it yourself: in the first minute of playing, if you randomly tap a button, it'll probably try to get you to pay four or five times. And these games are all small, lightweight, kind of crude-looking visually, and they'd run into all sorts of regulatory red lines in China pretty easily too.
Before the onsite I thought the culture and the managers all seemed pretty good, and reading this board's complaints I didn't fully believe them. Now I believe them. Completely. Happy holidays, everyone.
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