When Matt Kaufman ’94 thinks about childhood meetups with friends, he remembers bike rides, trips to the beach, going to the movies and afternoons spent at the park.
Today’s children? They meet up in virtual worlds, and Kaufman is helping to make sure their online playgrounds are safe.
As the chief safety officer at Roblox, a gaming platform and creation system used by more than 150 million people each day, Kaufman leads safety and civility efforts across one of the world’s most complex online ecosystems. Through this vast digital space, young users are gaining important socialization skills, such as how to communicate, collaborate and be respectful to one another.
“Those lessons are learned on online platforms like Roblox,” he said. “It puts a tremendous amount of responsibility on us to implement systems that keep people safe.”
An unexpected flight path to software engineering
Kaufman didn’t always imagine his path would lead to software engineering. Growing up, he wanted to fly, and in high school, he earned his pilot’s license. With his passion for flight, the UC Davis mechanical and aeronautical engineering program — now known as aerospace engineering — was a natural fit.
While earning his undergraduate degree, he found community through the UC Davis Cycling Team and as member of Alpha Epsilon Pi.
“I have managed very large and complicated teams, and I like to think my initial management experience was being the president of a fraternity and figuring out how to motivate a loose collection of people with different interests to get stuff done,” he said.
After graduating, he launched into systems engineering at Lockheed Martin before pivoting to software engineering. UC Davis had given him an understanding that, regardless of the discipline, many engineers approach problem-solving in similar ways.
What stood out most from his UC Davis education were the hands-on courses and the freedom to explore solutions from multiple angles. That mindset, he said, became the backbone of his career. It’s also what he looks for when hiring new talent at Roblox.
“The most interesting people to hire are the people who have intersecting skills,” he said. “Those engineering skills come in and make your tool kit of what you know how to do really interesting.”
Engineering systems at scale
The challenges he solves today look very different from the ones he studied in college, but the foundations remain the same: break down massive, seemingly intractable problems into smaller pieces, understand how those pieces interact and build systems that can operate reliably at scale.
While it may be easy to imagine a theoretical new product or service, Kaufman said turning that idea into reality is far more involved. His teams must create solutions that are reliable and repeatable to support Roblox’s massive user base.
And, because Roblox is a social gaming platform, every technical decision affects how people interact with each other. Safety features, design choices and new tools all shape user behavior, which means each new solution must be evaluated from multiple angles before it goes online.
In the future, he sees engineers’ roles expanding as artificial intelligence and machine learning automate more routine tasks that once demanded human attention.
Automation won’t eliminate the need for engineers, he said. It will change the work they do. Engineers will increasingly shift toward designing, refining and governing large, interconnected systems with the support of automated tools. To do so, they’ll need to understand these systems deeply enough to know when to trust automated solutions and when to intervene.
“More and more, engineering is about solving systems problems,” he said. “You have to understand the components, but what you’re really doing is figuring out how all the pieces work together, where the risks are, where the opportunities to optimize are. That’s the future.”