Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ad Serving

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. The Ad Serving team designs, builds, deploys, and operates Roku's Supply-Side, Ad Mediation, and Demand-Side platforms, which sit at the core of Roku's ad monetization and are critical to the business.

We are looking for a staff-level machine learning engineer with deep research and data science expertise to lead marketplace intelligence and demand optimization initiatives.

This role will drive improvements in Roku Exchange efficiency by applying advanced data analytics and machine learning techniques to optimize pricing, allocation, and auction across the marketplace.

For New York Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,000 - $510,000 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.

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.

- Translate ambiguous business problems into clear hypotheses, measurable objectives, and actionable strategies

- Develop advanced ML models and research-driven methodologies to drive product innovation and improve business outcomes

- Design and run live experiments to prototype improvements and validate their effectiveness

- Build production-grade ML systems that operate reliably in large-scale, low-latency ad serving environments

- Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to define, plan, and drive the ML strategy for Ad Serving

- Provide technical leadership and mentorship in machine learning, experimentation frameworks, and applied research best practices

- 10+ years of industry experience applying machine learning and data science to solve complex, mission-critical real-world problems

- Deep expertise in statistics, machine learning, and optimization techniques

- Perform as a staff+ technologist on complex, revenue-critical, large-scale distributed ML systems

- Hands-on experience building and deploying ML models in production, including feature engineering, model serving, monitoring, and continuous improvement

- Solid software engineering skills in languages such as Python, SQL, and Java/Scala

- Strong CS fundamentals with the ability to translate ideas into clean, efficient code with ease

- Excellent written and verbal communication and collaboration skills

- Proven track record of leading cross-functional teams and initiatives

- Publications in leading peer-reviewed conferences or academic journals are a plus