Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Content Platform
What does the team work on?
Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. While we are well-positioned to help shape the future of television - including TV advertising - around the world, continued success relies on its investment in our machine learning capabilities. Roku offers millions of options to our users: movies, episodes, news, sports, and channels from all around the world. The Roku Content Platform is key to onboarding content into the Roku ecosystem, delighting our customers. We are building a content knowledge platform that provides insights to downstream systems like Search, Recommendations, Ads, and Voice to shape customers' experiences.
What is the role?
We are seeking a highly experienced and skilled Senior Engineer to join our backend and data team. This role is crucial for designing, building, and optimizing distributed data pipelines, real-time data processing systems, and backend solutions that effectively handle large-scale data. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Java, distributed systems, and big data technologies, and a passion for solving complex problems and delivering robust solutions. We're always in "build mode" because we're a company of data-focused builders. Every day, you'll look at what exists and find ways to make it better and help drive innovation.
How will I use AI at Roku?
At Roku, we don't just use AI, we work with it. AI agents and smart tools help power drafts, analysis, and repetitive workflows, while our people bring direction, judgment, and accountability. We're looking for curious, adaptable builders who can show how they've used AI or automation to move faster, raise the bar, and scale their impact.
We value your AI skills if have built fluency across the agentic engineering toolchain - coding harnesses like Claude Code or Cursor, MCP servers, custom skills, or agent frameworks. And you can describe projects where you shipped real work with these tools. You know how to drive an agent, verify its output, and ramp on an unfamiliar codebase with an agent helping you.
What are the responsibilities of the role?
- Define architecture and technical strategy, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance at scale
- Provide technical guidance, conduct code reviews, and mentor engineers to elevate team capabilities and foster engineering excellence
- Design and implement robust distributed systems, streaming solutions, content management systems, APIs, and data pipelines that handle high-volume content operations
- Partner with Product, Operations, Business, and other engineering teams to deliver integrated solutions
- Remain significantly hands-on with critical features and architectural components
- Drive technical planning, prioritization, and execution aligned with business objectives
- Act as a key technical partner to the Engineering Manager in driving team success and technical decisions
- Champion a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and continuous improvement; establish engineering best practices
- Lead efforts in monitoring, observability, performance optimization, and production reliability at scale
What experience would help someone be successful in this role at Roku?
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant time in senior engineering roles
- Proven expertise in building scalable, distributed, and streaming solutions in production environments
- Deep experience with content management systems, media processing, or publishing platforms
- Expert-level proficiency in Java or Scala required; Python experience is a strong plus
- Strong expertise in distributed systems architecture, microservices, and event-driven architectures
- Deep understanding of streaming technologies (Kafka, Redpanda, or similar
- Advanced knowledge of databases (SQL/NoSQL), vector databases (e.g., Milvus), caching strategies, and data modeling at scale
- Track record of leading complex technical projects from conception to production in high-scale environments
- Excellent communication skills and ability to influence technical decisions across teams and organizations
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) at enterprise scale
- Extensive experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience with search technologies (Elasticsearch, Solr, etc) or recommendation systems
