Senior Software Engineer, AI Tooling
Roku · Austin, United States · 8d ago
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 you'll be doing
- Responsible for designing and implementing secure, reliable AI-powered tools and platforms—using technologies such as large language models and retrieval-augmented generation—and integrating them into core engineering workflows to improve quality, performance, and operational oversight.
- AI Leadership: Architect and guide implementation of AI tooling and pipelines using LLMs, RAG, and MCP, including retrieval design, model orchestration, safety guardrails, and backend integrations. Establish standards for data validation, analysis, and anomaly detection; implement automated quality gates to safeguard log and telemetry integrity at scale. Define coding and documentation standards for Python-based services and AI-assisted development; conduct code and design reviews to uphold engineering rigor. Develop performance testing and monitoring strategies; instrument metrics and health endpoints to drive continuous optimization.
- Technical Delivery: Create and maintain software solutions within the team’s domain; own epics and tasks and delegate work as needed to ensure timely delivery.
- Mentoring and Coaching: Lead onboarding and accelerate ramp-up through structured curricula, shadowing, and clear success metrics. Provide educational code/design reviews and formal training; serve as a Subject Matter Expert to unblock teams, elevate standards, and develop future senior engineers.
- People Collaboration: Orchestrate cross-functional alignment with system architects, platform, UI, product, data, and QA to deliver core OS features and high-impact platform improvements on schedule. Lead incident triage and root-cause analysis across logging, telemetry, and developer tooling, including AI-assisted workflows with RAG insights and MCP integrations; optimize pipelines for reliability, latency, and cost.
- Business Leadership: Translate company strategy into an engineering roadmap with clear priorities, success metrics, and delivery commitments; make disciplined trade-offs to maximize customer impact, reliability, and cost efficiency. Align stakeholders on objectives and risks; communicate rationale and expected outcomes; adjust plans based on data and changing business needs.
You are required to have
- Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science or related field.
- 2 years experience in position, as a Software Engineer, or related occupation.
Must have at least 1 year of prior work experience in each of the following:
- Build and integrate AI tooling using Agents, Model Context Protocol (or equivalents) with adapters, authentication, auditing, and lifecycle management.
- Develop and evaluate prompts and systems with grounding, citation, hallucination mitigation, red-teaming, and A/B experimentation.
- Design and deliver user interfaces that prioritize clarity, discoverability, minimal friction, and consistent interaction patterns across surfaces.
- Optimize performance through latency/throughput tuning, async/concurrency patterns, profiling, and device–cloud considerations.
- System design, tradeoff analysis, architectural patterns, and code reviews.
- Python services, Linux, cloud-native stacks, concurrency/async I/O, and modern networking for AI workloads.
Up to one day per week telecommuting may be permitted.
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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 EmployeeRelations@Roku.com.
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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