Principal Architect

Responsibilities:

• Architect and lead Roku's observability platform across metrics, logs, and traces; evolve data pipelines and storage layers optimised for high throughput, performance, and cost at Roku scale (TSDBs, Parquet, and distributed processing).
• Extend and harden open-source observability systems; overhaul core components (e. g., storage layers and query paths) to improve performance, reliability, and usability at scale.
• Implement features such as pre-aggregation, down-sampling, and sampling to reduce load and accelerate queries across the platform.
• Collaborate across platforms, SRE, and product teams to migrate hundreds of workloads to our common platform; augment and automate CI/CD flows and onboarding.
• Integrate security into infrastructure and platform services; ensure robust multitenant, multicluster, and multicloud designs.
• Contribute improvements back to open-source and CNCF-aligned projects; shape standards adoption (OpenTelemetry and OpenMetrics) across the company.
• Mentor engineers; establish best practices for reliability, efficiency, and cost management across service mesh and observability domains.

Requirements:

• 15+ years in software engineering with a track record of architecting distributed systems or platforms at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience in Golang and one scripting language (e. g., Python or shell).
• Experience operating observability at PB-scale ingestion and hundreds of millions of series.
• Expertise in observability platforms and tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, ELK/OpenSearch, ClickHouse) and standards (OpenTelemetry, OpenMetrics).
• Deep experience building systems of scale and operating cloud infrastructure with Kubernetes; strong proficiency with service mesh technologies (Istio/Envoy) and infrastructure as code (Terraform) and experience in multicloud (AWS, GCP).
• Demonstrated ability to evolve storage and query architectures for cost, scale, and latency (e. g., TSDB, Parquet, and distributed processing).
• Proven experience integrating security as part of infrastructure and platform development.
• Exceptional cross-functional communication; effective collaboration with both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Culture fit: independent thinker, pragmatic problem-solver, low-ego collaborator who moves fast and focuses on company success.
• Experience integrating AI tools to improve processes and reduce toil.
• Open-source contributions in CNCF projects are preferred but not mandatory.

Skills

architect, architecture, go, golang, kubernetes