Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform
Roku · Boston, United States +1 · 2mo 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'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.
About the Role
We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) 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 state of the art pacing engine, scoring/ML engine, modularizing designed for agentic development. Our reliability bar keeps climbing alongside our business scale. We need someone who can rapidly master this intricate ecosystem and take immediate ownership of key initiatives.
For Massachusetts Only — The estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,500 – $352,100 annually. Compensation packages are based on factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, certifications, and specific geographical location. This role is eligible for health insurance, equity awards, life insurance, disability benefits, parental leave, wellness benefits, and paid time off.
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, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
- Take end-to-end ownership of specific subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and long-term evolution
- Build a working mental model of a highly distributed, complex production system, and make high-leverage contributions
- Identify opportunities to continuously evolve the system and tooling
- Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making
- Diagnose and resolve subtle, often timing- or statistics-related issues in a highly concurrent, multi-region distributed system
- Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team
- Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners
We're Excited If You Have
- 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems — ideally including at least one system you built substantially from the ground up
- A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback
- Proven ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive fast — you enjoy the “figure it out” part of the job as much as the “build it” part
- Experience evolving and refactoring 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
- Practical 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 applying statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems is a strong plus
- Real-time bidding / ad-tech domain experience is a big plus, but deep experience in adjacent high-stakes, low-latency domains (trading systems, large-scale ranking/recommendation, matchmaking, risk/fraud systems) is equally valued
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- High ownership, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort operating with ambiguity
- Low-ego and nonpolitical — you'd rather get to the right answer than be the one who's right, and you take critical feedback in stride rather than personally
- Genuinely collaborative and team-oriented, with an open mind toward other people's approaches and the outgoing energy to work well across teams
- You've used AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) in real production work to accelerate design, implement, debug, and understand unfamiliar codebases. You have informed opinions on how best to leverage them
- You're curious about applying AI – whether that means using AI to monitor system health, triage issues or develop agentic workflows
- You hold yourself to a high bar of correctness and understanding of what you ship, even as these tools accelerate your pace
- Deep prior experience isn't required — genuine curiosity and a willingness to help shape how the team uses these tools responsibly are what matters most
#LI-SSC
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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