Senior Software 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. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer for the Advertising Platform to play a vital role in this mission.

If you bring extensive experience building complex systems, love great technology at scale, enjoy mentoring, jumping in, and figuring things out in any system, this role is for you!

Roku pioneered TV streaming and continues to innovate, leading the industry. The Roku Channel has us well-positioned to help shape the future of streaming. Continued success relies on investing in Advertising Engineering.

The ideal candidate will possess endless curiosity and be able to pair a global mindset with locally relevant execution. The successful candidate will demonstrate a balance of hard and soft skills, including the ability to respond promptly to evolving business needs.

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.

For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,000 - $408,000 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.

- 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

- 10+ years of experience building large-scale and low-latency distributed systems

- 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

- B.S. or M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent

- Self-motivated individual with a high level of accountability and ownership

- AI literacy and curiosity. You have either 1) tried Gen AI in your previous work or outside of work or 2) are curious about Gen AI and have explored it