Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure
Roku · Cambridge +1 · 9mo 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.
About the team
Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. As we strive to influence the future of television globally, including TV advertising, the ongoing success depends heavily on our investment in the Content Management System. With Roku providing millions of movies, episodes, news, and channels, the Content Management System plays a vital role in managing content ingestion, selection, enrichment, and curation. We are seeking engineers capable of developing, designing, and deploying highly scalable, dependable applications, tools, and automation frameworks essential for efficiently handling the vast volume of content in our pipeline.
About the role
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help design and build large-scale video infrastructure powering Live and VOD streaming workflows at Roku. In this role, you will collaborate with video engineers to build systems responsible for ingesting, processing, and delivering large volumes of video content. You will design and maintain resilient, cloud-native services that operate continuously at scale, solving complex distributed systems challenges across high-throughput media pipelines. This position requires hands-on software development, including writing new code and maintaining existing codebases across critical video infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep experience in backend systems engineering and a passion for building reliable, performant services that directly impact how millions of users stream content. This is an opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the infrastructure that powers Roku's streaming platform.
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 you'll be doing
- Design, build, optimize, and maintain large-scale data-stream pipelines for Live and VOD video encoding workflows running in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP
- Develop high-throughput, low-latency containerized services for video ingestion, decoding, transcoding, packaging, transport, delivery, and ad avail markers management
- Architect systems capable of consuming 24/7 video and audio streams from thousands of providers in real time
- Design resilient worker-to-worker streaming and transport mechanisms capable of handling network instability, packet loss, retransmission, and continuous data flow at scale
- Build scalable orchestration and container-management systems supporting autoscaling, fault tolerance, service recovery, and rolling deployments
- Develop advanced real-time monitoring, telemetry, logging, and alerting systems to provide operational visibility and rapid failure detection
We're excited if you have
- Experience building distributed backend systems and cloud-native infrastructure at scale
- Deep understanding of container orchestration, worker lifecycle management, autoscaling, resiliency, and cloud infrastructure patterns
- Experience designing systems that continuously process high-throughput data streams with strict reliability and uptime requirements
- Experience debugging networking issues, packet loss, transport instability, and distributed system failures in real-time streaming environments
- Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python
- Hands-on experience with media frameworks and libraries such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, or similar technologies
- Experience with GPU-accelerated encoding or hardware media pipelines
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or other orchestration platforms
- Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or Datadog
- Experience building fault-tolerant ingest or transcoding platforms operating across multiple regions
#LI-JC5
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.
By providing your information, you acknowledge that you want Roku to contact you about job roles, that you have read Roku's Applicant Privacy Notice, and understand that Roku will use your information as described in that notice. If you do not wish to receive any communications from Roku regarding this role or similar roles in the future, you may unsubscribe at any time by emailing WorkforcePrivacy@Roku.com.