Senior Software Engineer, Backend

Job Summary

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 weve 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, youll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. Were 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.

Team focus

Roku Search team directly contributes to Rokus mission by helping connect users to the content they like and enabling content publishers to build and monetize large audiences. Our team builds state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to optimize search relevance and highly scalable, reliable low latency search platform infrastructure to power a delightful search experience.

Role overview

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us take our Search infrastructure to the next level of scalability, power innovation, and growth worldwide. You will build and support world-class search platform infrastructure that powers Search Query Understanding, Autocomplete, Candidate Retrieval (Lexical Embedding Based), Search Ranking, and Personalization. You will iterate and optimize for improving platform KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), driving reliability, stability, low latency, and cost efficiency across search API and indexing systems, ML infrastructure, and search data platforms. You will manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with limited supervision. This is a high-impact engineering role where your work will directly shape the search experience for millions of Roku users globally.

AI at Roku

At Roku, AI agents do most of the keystroke-level coding. Engineers act as the technical leads for those agents - setting context, planning work, verifying outputs, and recovering when the agent goes off course. If you are excited about working this way, we want to talk to you.

At Roku, were embracing AI as a powerful tool to amplify human creativity, accelerate innovation, and deliver better results for our customers. Across teams, were exploring how AI can enhance our work - and were only looking for people who are curious, adaptable, and excited to grow alongside these technologies.

Responsibilities

• Build and support world-class search platform infrastructure that powers Search Query Understanding, Autocomplete, Candidate Retrieval (Lexical Embedding Based), Search Ranking, and Personalization
• Iterate and optimize for improving platform KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), driving reliability, stability, low latency, and cost efficiency across search API and indexing systems, ML infrastructure, and search data platforms
• Manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables with limited supervision

Experience and qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building large-scale software solutions to concrete problems
• Strong computer science fundamentals with the ability to write algorithms with ease
• Fluency in one of the high-level programming languages like Java, Scala, Go, or Python
• Experience working with big data systems (Spark, Kafka, Flink, S3, Airflow)
• Expertise in data storing solutions with the ability to make a reasoned choice between various products like MySQL, DynamoDB, Redis, and RocksDB
• Experience with ETL pipelines, both streaming and batch
• In-depth knowledge of at least one search engine (Elasticsearch, Solr, Lucene, Vespa)
• 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

Hybrid work and culture

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.

Accommodations

Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law.

Culture

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the companys 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. Were independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku youll be part of a company thats 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 isnt 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.