Senior Software Engineer, Ad Serving

About the Team

A highly scalable and highly available real-time advertising platform is crucial for supporting and growing Roku's advertising business. The mission of the Ad Engineering Team is to build this platform. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Advertising Platform to play a vital role in this mission.

About the Role

Building a real-time, highly scalable, and available advertising platform is critical for our success. Our team’s mission is to build a best-in-class advertising platform to support and grow Roku’s exploding ad business. Our platforms are highly performant, deployed at scale, and set new standards for enabling effective advertising while protecting user privacy.

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 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.

What You'll Be Doing

• Work alongside a highly skilled engineering team to design, develop, and maintain large-scale, highly performing, real-time applications
• Own building features, driving directly with the product, and other engineering teams
• Demonstrate excellent communication skills in working with technical and non-technical audiences
• Be an evangelist for best practices across all functions – developers, QA, and infrastructure/ops
• Be an evangelist for platform innovation and reuse
• Deliver top-quality software in a timely fashion

We're Excited If You Have

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale and low-latency distributed systems
• Command of Java or C++
• Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, performance optimization techniques, object-oriented programming, multi-threading, and real-time programming
• Experience with distributed caching, SQL/NoSQL, and other databases is a plus
• Experience with Big Data and cloud services such as AWS/GCP is a plus
• Experience in the advertising domain is a big plus
• B.S. or M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent
• Self-motivated individual with a high level of accountability and ownership
• Critical thinking and practical decision-making
• Can do, results-oriented mindset
• Nonpolitical, collaborative, and team-oriented
• Desire to win in a highly competitive industry
• AI literacy and curiosity: you have either tried Gen AI in your work/outside work or are curious about Gen AI and have explored it

Hybrid Work Model

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 roles or locations requiring five days a week attendance.