Working at Roblox: Meet bc Wong

As the Complex Director on the Rely on & Protection workforce, bc Wong helps defend our group by building instruments, processes, and systems designed to limit publicity to abusive written content and behaviors. We spoke with bc to study much more about his essential work on building a safe and sound and civil space for everybody on Roblox.

Describe your team’s function right here at Roblox.

We make units that establish abuse, equally proactively and reactively (meaning immediately after end users report them), and acquire motion on the content material (removal) as effectively as the people who violate our group standards. We use a great deal of device studying and also leverage human moderators where by we simply cannot automate yet.

How is your practical experience as Complex Director at Roblox diverse from other engineering management roles you’ve experienced?

My career as an personal contributor is related to quite a few some others: support figure out the future point out of product and engineering, rally the team towards it, and contribute to technical options that get us there. But what is particular at Roblox is the men and women. In addition to staying gifted, my teammates are passionate about our Have faith in & Basic safety mission. It’s invigorating to perform with a crew with these a robust feeling of reason and see our do the job translate into true entire world effects.

In reality, all of us treatment deeply about the neighborhood. Numerous of us who do the job here have been on Roblox for a extensive time—some even acquired to code from Roblox—and we all want to construct a extra civil neighborhood. So, an fascinating problem for Belief & Safety is how to improved leverage the complete enterprise in our mission. Which is something we’re actively performing on. Personally, I get to interact with many distinctive groups, which is anything I love a large amount.

What is one of the most exciting features about operating on your group at Roblox?

In basic, how to preserve abuse off a platform is a frequently evolving obstacle. We will need to do a good deal of analysis and experimentation as an field. For Roblox, we also need to have to scale our remedies to guidance such a vast audience. For Roblox, the huge audience of our platform provides a twist to the dilemma. A social system catering exclusively to older people could pick to basically kick out any people who show inappropriate habits, our resolution needs to assistance a wide assortment of age teams. For occasion, some buyers may well not totally have an understanding of our community criteria or they have not realized how to act responsibly online. There is an possibility right here—and virtually a accountability—to teach the future technology on how to turn out to be civil on line citizens.

What are some of the far more tricky troubles you and your staff are doing the job on?

I’ll give two examples of problems with extremely unique time scales. We play a cat-and-mouse game with persons who abuse our platform. When they are able to  exploit gaps in our detection methods, we appear up with better and additional systematic strategies to capture them. The crucial right here is to be systematic, to obtain invariants in how abusers behave. We’re mostly succeeding. But our response time is not instantaneous nonetheless. This intersection of analytics, data infrastructure, and product integration is a blast to do the job on.

At a a great deal broader time scale, the functionality of basic safety requirements to evolve as the Roblox community is becoming a lot more various. A year back, a lot more than 50 percent of our people were being below 13. Now extra than 50 percent are in excess of 13. How can we give our end users far more flexibility and nevertheless keep the knowledge harmless? Different groups across the company are collaboratively doing the job on this, re-imagining essential components of the system. This also ties into a issue I designed previously, on how to improved leverage the entire organization in the Trust & Basic safety mission.

How has the perform at Roblox challenged you?

I’ve been continuously learning considering that I joined about a 12 months and 50 percent ago, which is a good deal of fun. The Rely on & Basic safety area was new for me. So was device understanding. I basically transported my 1st ML model at Roblox. Now I’m mastering about our graphics rendering technological know-how. The engineering facet of Roblox has so lots of varied technologies that I often truly feel like an intern.

How does Roblox support you as a technological innovator?

What has been pretty handy in guiding me is one particular of Roblox’s main values, “Take the Lengthy View”. There is still plenty of short-time period tactical get the job done to do, but using the extended look at worries me to realize and organize them in relation to the place I want to get to. It also can help me see the more substantial gaps that really do not show up in any tactical to-do checklist. For case in point, it’s possible we could be a whole lot a lot more helpful if we have an solely new class of details analytics ability. Roblox offers me room to examine and take a look at that out.

I’m also fortunate to have accessibility to the entire Roblox brain trust to collect and validate suggestions. There are deep domain experts in facts science, equipment finding out, infrastructure, networking, compilers, graphics, and more. I’ve picked their brains on one factor or one more. Often when they have suggestions connected to safety, they reach out to the group. Everyone I’ve satisfied at Roblox (and I joined during the pandemic) is incredibly nice, valuable, and generous with their time. This cross pollination of concepts, across such a various group, is one particular of the issues I adore most about Roblox.

Interested in joining the Belief & Protection group at Roblox? We’re usually on the lookout for new talent, so test us out at corp.roblox.com/careers and see if there is a function that’s appropriate for you.