Avanish Kulkarni, a Lifelong Roblox Fan, Will Become a Developer There
Alvanish Kulkarni got his dream job right out of college.
Kulkarni, an Albert Dorman Honors College member who calls East Brunswick home, is graduating with a B.S. in computer science and will move to Silicon Valley this summer to become a software engineer at videogame platform company Roblox.
He scored the coveted position at Roblox after interning there in summer 2025 — and even that was highly competitive, with around 50,000 applicants whittled down to just a couple of hundred students selected.
Unlike traditional computer games, Roblox is more of a development platform where anyone can build their own game and share it with the community. The company opened in 2006, and Kulkarni has been playing since childhood.
Kulkarni said that in his interview, the discussion centered on games he’d played and the development behind them, while some of the developers were in the same room. He realized that not only would it be a great job, but it would also be a way for him to give back to the community.
For college, Kulkarni was interested in mechanical engineering as a teen and came to NJIT for that major, but he came to realize that bits called to him more strongly than atoms. Still, “Mechanical engineering involves systems design, requiring consideration of how small changes to a part impact the entire assembly. My interest in mechanical engineering helped me hone my ability to anticipate how granular code changes might impact complex software architecture,” he noted.
Combined with his love for gaming, “I could have worked in a dedicated game development company, but game development is kind of rough to work in. It’s a lot of crunch hours. Or I could have developed an indie game. I was actually kind of trying to develop my own games for a bit, but it’s a very difficult and mentally draining job. Roblox ended up being an ideal in-between for me,” Kulkarni explained. “I’m working on the tools that make games. It’s closer to a traditional software engineering job, but I’m still in the industry.”
Kulkarni credited his success to his two favorite faculty members in NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing — Senior University Lecturer Abdul-Rahman Itani and Assistant Prof. Martin Kellogg.
Kulkarni took Itani for CS-435, Advanced Data Structures and Algorithm Design. “Without him, I probably wouldn’t have gotten some of the interviews I got, because his class sort of focused on the software engineering interview process … The guy’s a legend,” he stated.
Kellogg was Kulkarni’s instructor in three — CS-485, AI-Assisted Software Engineering; CS-485, Compilers and CS-490, Guided Design in Software Engineering.
“It's been fun to watch Avanish grow into his engineering abilities over the last three semesters. He's a joy to have in class and I've always been impressed with his ability to apply difficult theoretical concepts, especially to real engineering problems,” Kellogg said.
For a capstone project, Kulkarni helped build virtual reality software for construction workers in physical therapy, under Assistant Prof. Roni Barak Ventura. The software simulates physical tool use. He said his favorite programming language is Python, but at Roblox he’ll use Microsoft’s C#, Google’s open-source Go and also the open-source Rust.
Kulkarni’s advice to new students is solid: “Find specific mentors: professors and students. Plenty of people at NJIT have navigated the industry and know exactly how to connect what you learn to professional skills,” he said. “I would have started looking for internships even earlier. I didn't seriously start preparing for a job until my third year, and I regret that. I missed many excellent learning opportunities during my second summer at NJIT because I hadn't prepared.”