Securing Roblox: How Our Security Organization Enables Innovation, Trust, and Scale

At Roblox, security isn’t just about protection; it’s about enabling innovation on a scale few companies ever achieve. That philosophy has guided our journey from a small security team into a strategic organization that helps power one of the most dynamic platforms in the world.

When I joined Roblox 2.5 years ago, the Information Security team was just 28 people. We had immense potential, but we were still proving that security could be a partner, not a blocker. I recall sitting in our first post-incident review. The discussion wasn’t about a single technical failure, but about friction. We listened as the engineering team walked us through their workflow, and it became clear. The incident had not occurred due to negligence; it happened because of a gap in the system. A point in the process where security expertise was missing. That’s when I realized our role would not just be about preventing incidents; it would be about empowering teams by embedding security into their workflows, so they could build boldly and deliver with confidence.

That moment marked a turning point. We knew we had to evolve from reactive controls to proactive, strategic security, integrated into how Roblox builds and scales. Today, our InfoSec organization does more than safeguard systems: we create the foundations that help our builders move quickly while earning and maintaining user trust at a global scale.

Building Credibility and Momentum: The First 2.5 Years

Our early focus was on building trust by consistently showing up, solving problems that mattered, and embedding security into the development life cycle. One of the most impactful efforts I led was the transformation of our Web Application Firewall (WAF). We matured it from a basic tool into a robust protection layer for all externally facing services. Through automation, test environment validation, and smart rule deployment, we created a control that’s both effective and invisible to engineers.

That mindset, secure by default, not by friction, became a guiding principle as we matured our threat modeling, built scalable review processes, and earned our seat at the product table.

Being part of this journey has taught me that security isn’t just about protection; it’s about enabling creativity and confidence at scale. Seeing our team grow from 28 to over 100, while driving impact through innovation and collaboration, has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career.

Meet the Team Behind It All

As our vision expanded, so did our structure. Today, we’re more than 100 security engineers, analysts, and leaders, organized across dedicated pillars that reflect our evolving mission. I am proud to introduce some of the key teams driving this expansion:

Detection and Response (DART)

Responsible for maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Roblox systems and data. DART includes Security Operations, Incident Response, Detection Engineering, Threat Intelligence, Automation, Offensive Security, and Forensics. This team proactively identifies and responds to emerging threats while enabling our platform to scale securely.

• Recent win: Built an AI-driven automation to coordinate incident response across multiple workstreams, minimizing operational blockers and enabling teams to focus on critical resolution tasks.

Platform Security

Secures our network, cloud, production IAM, and hybrid infrastructure. The team delivers scalable capabilities like secure-by-default Kubernetes templates, secrets management, and fine-grained access control.

• Impact: Over the past year, the team delivered high-performance, scalable platforms for real-time secrets minting and revocation, self-service fine-grained authorization, secure production access interfaces, and eBPF-based network segmentation. These capabilities have empowered Roblox to scale rapidly without increasing risk to our community.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)

Strengthens enterprise security through a risk-first, data-informed approach to policies, vendor risk management, AI review, and control validation. GRC empowers every builder to make informed decisions while accelerating secure innovation.

• Highlight: Significantly accelerated the vendor security review process through automation, slashing typical turnaround times and enabling teams to move faster.

Enterprise Security

Focuses on corporate identity, endpoint protection, SaaS security, and the security of our third-party support workforce.

• Impact: Introduced device health checks into the employee authentication flow, driving a high level of compliance across the company.

Application Security

Sits at the intersection of engineering and security, enabling secure development through reviews, tooling, and CI/CD automation, including secure code scanning, hardened containers, and supply chain integrity.

• Innovation: Launched an ML-powered WAF rule generation workflow that analyzes Roblox-specific traffic patterns to filter out noise, detect attacks and malformed requests, and automatically generate app- and service-specific allowlist rules.

Global Security

Delivers physical and digital security services worldwide. The Global Security Operations Center (GSOC) operates 24/7 to manage threats, coordinate incidents, and protect large-scale events.

• Highlight: Successfully secured the 2024 Roblox Developer Conference (RDC), managing safety for thousands of attendees across multiple venues.

Privacy Engineering

Develops tools and infrastructure for scalable privacy compliance. Uses AI to automate data classification, generate compliance code, and reduce manual effort, supporting GDPR, CCPA, and internal governance efforts.

• Recent win: Rolled out a centralized system for automated Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs), reducing review cycles and supporting scalable privacy reviews across fast-moving teams.

What Makes Security at Roblox Unique

Few companies operate at Roblox’s scale, with tens of millions of daily active users on a global platform powered by a hybrid on-premise and cloud infrastructure, a fast-paced product cadence, and a vibrant developer ecosystem.

Faced with this complexity, a traditional security model would fail. That’s why our core belief is different: security shouldn’t just protect, it should accelerate. We achieve this through a culture of enablement that empowers every engineer to become a force multiplier. Instead of a one-size-fits-all process, our operating model is flexible and based on partnership. We enable teams to move fast by providing automated guardrails and self-service tools for everyday development, while reserving our deep, hands-on collaboration for the most complex and high-risk features. This entire approach becomes proactive, as we strive to embed ourselves in planning and ideation cycles across the company to help teams build security in, right from the start.

This balance of automation and partnership gives our engineers the agency not just to raise concerns but to drive improvements, fostering empowerment at every level.

With a goal of 1 billion daily active users, our work spans protecting real-time interactions, securing user-generated content, and supporting innovations in 3D simulation, AI, and digital economies. These challenges require us to constantly invent new approaches, from scalable security review systems and ML-powered threat detection to privacy automation and developer-first guardrails.

We’re not just keeping up; we’re building what’s next. That’s what makes security at Roblox different.

Build With Us

We’ve built a strong foundation, but the most exciting challenges are still ahead. From scaling responsible AI to advancing identity protection and developer-first security tooling, we’re focused on shaping what modern security looks like on a global scale.

If you’re looking to solve real problems, lead with impact, and help shape the future of the internet, we invite you to join us.

Let’s build the future of security, together.