Senior Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform
Teamwork makes the stream work.
Roku is changing how the world watches TV
Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and we've set our sights on powering every television in the world. Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Our mission is to be the TV streaming platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem. We connect consumers to the content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers unique capabilities to engage consumers.
From your first day at Roku, you'll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. We're a fast-growing public company where no one is a bystander. We offer you the opportunity to delight millions of TV streamers around the world while gaining meaningful experience across a variety of disciplines.
What does the team work on?
Roku's Ad Serving Team builds and operates the real-time advertising platform that powers all of Roku’s ad monetization across video, display, and native ad formats. Within Ad Serving, the Demand Bidder team owns the high throughput and low latency systems responsible for serving relevant ads for tens of thousands of campaigns through targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, measurement and more. Every millisecond and every decision carries direct, measurable revenue impact, and the team operates with the high engineering rigor that this demands.
What is the role?
We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help scale and evolve this platform. Demand Bidder is a large, high-throughput system driving our next phase of growth. As we onboard a rapid wave of new businesses, we are actively scaling and advancing our architecture - including our pacing engine, scoring/ML engine, and modularizing for agentic development. You'll work alongside a strong team of engineers tackling meaningful technical challenges at scale.
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 you 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?
- Design, build, and contribute to core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
- Own features and drive them end-to-end in partnership with product and other engineering teams
- Build a working mental model of a highly distributed, complex production system and make meaningful contributions
- Help identify opportunities to evolve the system and tooling over time
- Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making
- Help diagnose and resolve subtle, often timing- or statistics-related issues in a highly concurrent, multi-region distributed system
- Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and collaborate across engineering, product, and business partners
- Be an evangelist for best practices across development, testing, and operations
What experience would help someone be successful in this role at Roku?
- 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems
- Experience owning features or subsystems through design, build, testing, deployment, and iteration based on production feedback
- Ability to ramp into unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive - you enjoy the “figure it out” part of the job as much as the “build it” part
- Comfort contributing to live, business-critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness
- Strong command of Java, with a solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency/multi-threading, and performance optimization
- Experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores
- Comfort operating in cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) at scale
- Exposure to statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems is a plus
- Real-time bidding / ad-tech domain experience is a plus, but experience in adjacent high-stakes, low-latency domains (trading systems, ranking/recommendation, matchmaking, risk/fraud systems) is equally valued
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- Self-motivated, critical thinker, comfortable operating with some ambiguity
- Low-ego, nonpolitical, and genuinely collaborative
- You've used AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) in real work - deep prior experience isn't required, curiosity is what matters most
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What's Roku's approach to hybrid working?
Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams generally work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are generally flexible for remote work, except for employees whose specific roles or assigned office location require five days' a week attendance.
What are some of the benefits?
Roku is committed to offering a diverse range of benefits as part of our compensation package to support our employees and their families. Our comprehensive benefits include global access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources. Local benefits include statutory and voluntary benefits which may include healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), life, accident, disability, commuter, and retirement options (401(k)/pension). Employees are supported in taking time off, in accordance with local leave policies and other personal needs to support their evolving work and life needs. It's important to note that not every benefit is available in all locations or for every role. For details specific to your location, please consult with your recruiter.
Accommodations
Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please direct your inquiries to [email protected].
What should I know about Roku's culture?
Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We believe a fewer number of very talented folks can do more for less cost than a larger number of less talented teams. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's changing how the world watches TV.
We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn't real until it is built and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002.
To learn more about Roku, our global footprint, and how we've grown, visit https://www.weareroku.com/factsheet.
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