Senior Software Engineer, Roku
ML Infrastructure
More information about location
4 days a week in office
Convenient & affordable TV streaming players
Be an early applicant
Convenient & affordable TV streaming players
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
4 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide its users with a more convenient and cost effective way of watching the programs they love.
Role
Who you are
- Strong production software-engineering experience, including designing, testing, operating and debugging distributed services
- Meaningful ownership of ML infrastructure or production model delivery, with clear evidence of your contribution and its operational or adoption impact
- A practical understanding of the ML lifecycle: training, evaluation, versioning, deployment, online validation, monitoring and safe rollback
- Experience designing for latency, resilience, observability and cost in production systems
- Experience with LLMs, embeddings, semantic search, retrieval or agent systems, including how you evaluate quality and control failure modes
- Experience with caching systems and the trade-offs involved in using caching for low-latency services
- A commitment to automation, CI/CD, code quality and evidence-led engineering decisions
- A collaborative approach and the ability to explain technical trade-offs to partners across disciplines
- A degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience with AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, SQL warehouse and batch-processing technologies such as Trino, Presto or Spark, Kafka or other streaming systems, and Go or Python would be useful. Node.js experience is a plus. We value transferable evidence over an exact match to every named technology
What the job involves
- The Roku Entertainment Assistant team builds conversational AI experiences used across millions of Roku devices. The team works across fulfilment ranking, model delivery, offline and online evaluation, low-latency services, observability and product quality. Its published work includes shared model-serving and MLOps paths, automated evaluation and retraining, caching and telemetry, and agent-assisted release and operational workflows
- We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with strong machine-learning infrastructure experience to help the Roku Entertainment Assistant team deliver reliable, high-quality conversational experiences at scale. You will own production systems across ranking, model delivery, evaluation and LLM-agent behaviour, working closely with machine-learning, product, data and platform partners
- This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who can move comfortably between software architecture, ML lifecycle decisions and production operations. You will improve the paths the team uses to train, evaluate, deploy and observe models, while helping us manage latency, quality and cost as the product grows
- Own fulfilment-ranking pipelines from training orchestration and quality gates through deployment and online validation
- Build and operate an offline-evaluation platform, combining LLM-as-judge harnesses with deterministic checks for answer quality
- Develop the Roku Entertainment Assistant's LLM agent, including tool routing, retrieval, guardrails and answer caching
- Design caching as an intentional latency and cost lever for high-volume services
- Build observability for ML and LLM systems, including latency attribution, quality metrics, tracing and per-request cost
- Improve the reliability and operability of distributed systems, and lead the diagnosis of difficult cross-service failures
- Drive accountable AI-assisted engineering practices across the team, building on the agents already used in release workflows
- Work across machine-learning, product, data and platform boundaries to turn ambiguous problems into measurable delivery outcomes
Our take
According to Nielsen data, the average streamer spends over seven minutes searching for something to watch. Streaming services use customers' viewing history to make suggestions, but these are limited to programs licensed for that particular service.
Roku provides an integrated streaming service that offers TV channels, movies and third-party streaming services, resulting in an all-in-one streaming platform. The service can be accessed through a variety of customized subscription packages and fees.
Roku stands out in the streaming industry by bringing many competitors together in one package. The startup provides further innovative services such as a weekly TV series named 'Roku Recommends' which uses first-party data to recommend essential viewing to users.
Alongside funding filmmakers through its "Change Makers Program", Roku also acquired its own original library of shows through its acquisition of now-defunct Quibi's library. Then, after successful collaborations with TCL and Hisense, the first in-house "Roku Television" was released. In 2026, it was announced that media giant FOX would acquire Roku, which the companies say will create the third largest player in US TV by share of viewing.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jan 2016
$45.5m
LATE VC
Nov 2015
$45.5m
SERIES H
Total funding: $247.8m
Company benefits
- Medical, wellness and financial benefits
- Unlimited paid time off policy
- Work from home opportunities
Company HQ
Newhall, San Jose, CA
Leadership
Anthony Wood
(Founder & CEO)Studied Engineering at Texas A&M before founding their first company in 1986. They held VP roles at both Adobe and Netflix.
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