Working at Roblox: Meet Denise Szeto

Continuing our spotlight series on the talented employees at Roblox, we now turn our attention to Denise Szeto, a Senior Software Engineer whose priority is to ensure our platform is a safe and secure place for sharing experiences with friends. Here, Denise tells us a bit about what her day-to-day looks like as a member of our Trust & Safety team.

Describe your role here at Roblox.

My role is to keep users safe on Roblox. I work on the content safety team within the broader Trust & Safety organization, and we’re primarily a backend-heavy team focused on improving how we moderate content (e.g., text, images, audio, experiences, etc.) on the platform. So, my job revolves around finding better ways to quickly detect unsafe content and take action. Engineering-wise, this translates to researching new user bypasses, building new machine learning algorithms, and working with moderators to better understand the bad actor ecosystem.

What does engineering with safety in mind mean to you?

For me, engineering with safety in mind means proactively thinking about safety when planning out projects. Safety isn’t just an afterthought; from the outset of any project, we take the time to carefully consider how bad actors could exploit our technology to bypass our detection methods and build the appropriate safety measures into the product.

What gets you excited to come to work on the Trust & Safety team every day?

On Trust & Safety, we have challenging engineering problems to solve. Having a team around me that is motivated and excited about coming up with creative solutions to these problems makes every day exciting.

Every day, my team and I come to work knowing that the projects we're working on are keeping our community safe on the platform. No project is too small, as every improvement made can make a difference in the way users interact. It's exciting to see our projects come to fruition and to see the impact we have in people’s lives.

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

In other roles that I’ve had, I’ve been given a product spec and been in charge of implementing it one-to-one. Our work is much more free-form than that. We’re always pushing the boundaries and coming up with new and innovative ways to make Roblox safer for our users. This allows us to have a huge impact on the work we do, and it gives us the ability to prioritize efforts that are most pressing as we see new trends emerge in real-time.

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

I love how collaborative we are as a team and our willingness to invest in finding long-term solutions to the problems we face today. We have a great team of people from diverse backgrounds with different perspectives on how to approach a problem. This often leads to us having more healthy debates on how to best further the project. Everyone that I’ve had the chance to work with has always been such a team player.

Most recently, we’ve been working on finding quicker ways to detect objectionable content, and through some great discussions, we’ve managed to come up with additional detection methods. There’s a ton of knowledge sharing that happens between each team member that’s motivated by everyone’s willingness to help each other out.

Interested in joining the Trust & Safety 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.