Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Job Summary

The primary responsibility of the Content Management team is to develop and manage the Content Management System (CMS). This system processes all content showcased on the Roku Channel, including creating ingestion pipelines, collaborating with partners for content acquisition, processing metadata, and managing content selection. The team also ensures that all Roku personnel can seamlessly update metadata. The Content Management team collaborates closely with the Recommendation team to enhance content curation and personalized recommendations. The system is designed to be highly scalable, leveraging distributed architectures and machine learning algorithms. The team aims to build a next-generation platform by revamping, redesigning, and expanding existing systems. This initiative addresses scalability, latency constraints, and accommodates a growing number of content providers and partners.

Role Overview

In this role, you will be part of the Roku Content Management System and Tools Engineering team, playing a key role in developing the next-generation content management systems that drive content ingestion, selection, management, and curation workflows. These systems are vital for empowering critical functions like Search and Recommendation on the Roku Platform, and your projects will have a direct impact on millions of Roku users globally. You will collaborate with key stakeholders across various Roku engineering teams and take the lead in designing our content management system. This is an excellent role for a senior professional who thrives on having a critical business impact, is able to make key decisions, and is excited to work on a core content pipeline component which is crucial for many streaming components at Roku.

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.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement highly scalable and reliable web-scale applications, tools, and automation frameworks that power the Roku Content Management System
• Work closely with the product management team, content management services, and other internal product engineering teams to contribute towards evolving the Roku Content Management Systems and Tools
• Design and build data pipelines for batch, near-real-time, and real-time processing
• Translate functional specifications into logical, component-based technical designs
• Write and review code, and evaluate architectural tradeoffs for performance and security in high-performance systems
• Participate in architecture discussions, influence product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects
• Manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with limited supervision

Experience and Qualifications

• Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities
• 5+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer
• Proficiency in Java, Scala, or Python
• Strong technical competency and experience in building high-performance, cloud-based, scalable microservices
• Experience with microservice and event-driven architectures
• Experience with design and implementation of modern microservices architectures and API frameworks (REST/JSON)
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS (preferred), GCP, or similar
• Experience with NoSQL data storage technologies such as Cassandra, DynamoDB, or Redis, as well as RDBMS like Oracle or MySQL
• Ability to handle periodic on-call duty as well as out-of-band requests
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science plus 5 years of experience or equivalent; Masters degree preferred
• AI literacy and curiosity - you have either used generative AI in your previous work or outside of work, or are curious about generative AI and have explored it