Senior Software Engineer, Observability

About the team

The Observability team is part of Roku's Cloud Technology Infrastructure organization and plays a critical role in our platform. We are a high-performing, fast-moving international team that thrives on ownership, effective communication, and delivering impactful engineering solutions.

Our mission is to advance Roku's observability platform, which operates at an impressive scale by ingesting terabytes of data daily and managing hundreds of millions of active series. As part of this mission, we focus on building scalable, performant systems to meet Roku's unique needs. By leveraging open-source tools, CNCF-supported projects, and custom solutions, we enable engineering teams across Roku to monitor, debug, and optimize their applications with ease.

What sets us apart is our results-driven culture rooted in ownership, accountability, and fast iteration. We prioritize solving meaningful engineering problems, fostering collaboration, and continually improving our team's work processes.

About the role

You will work on core observability systems (metrics, logs, traces) while also developing robust data pipelines and storage solutions optimized for high throughput, performance, and cost. You'll leverage technologies such as time-series databases (TSDB), columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet), and distributed data processing frameworks to advance the platform's capabilities. Collaboration with cross-functional teams will be critical, as you'll integrate observability into Roku's cloud-native stack and contribute improvements back to the open-source community.

• Extend and integrate open-source observability systems, and when necessary, structurally overhaul core components, such as storage layers and query paths, to enhance the performance, reliability, and usability of these tools at scale.
• Build services to improve performance, usability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Implement features like pre-aggregation, downsampling, and sampling to reduce load and accelerate queries.
• Create developer-facing capabilities for metrics, logs, and traces usage, data quality, and cost management.
• Automate onboarding, dashboards, alerting, and tracing.
• Collaborate across platform and infrastructure teams to integrate observability into Roku's cloud-native stack.

We're excited if you have

• 8+ years in software engineering, building distributed, high-throughput systems or observability platforms.
• 4+ years of Go/Golang experience; our observability ecosystem is built on Go, making it the most effective language for this role.
• Experience with, or strong interest in, observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, ELK/OpenSearch, Clickhouse) and standards (OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, OpenMetrics).
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and data models
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).