Senior Software Engineer, AI Tooling

About the Role

Roku is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, AI Tooling to design and implement secure, reliable AI-powered tools and platforms—using technologies such as large language models and retrieval-augmented generation—and integrate them into core engineering workflows to improve quality, performance, and operational oversight.

What You'll Be Doing

• 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.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science or related field.
• 2 years of experience in the position, as a Software Engineer, or related occupation.
• 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.