Roku
Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform
San Jose, California · Staff+
Sponsorship not specified$195k-$408kDetected 11 hours ago
JavaDistributed SystemsData StructuresAlgorithmsSQLNoSQLAWSGCPCloud PlatformsMachine LearningAgentic AIStatisticsCommunicationCollaborationCritical ThinkingAdaptability
About the role
- We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to help scale and evolve this platform.
- Demand Bidder is a large, high-throughput system driving our next phase of growth.
- Our reliability bar keeps climbing alongside our business scale.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
- Build a working mental model of a highly distributed, complex production system, and make high-leverage contributions
- Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making
- Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners
- A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback
- Proven ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive fast - you enjoy the "figure it out" part of the job as much as the "build it" part
- You've used AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) in real production work to accelerate design, implement, debug, and understand unfamiliar codebases.
Requirements
- Practical experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores
- Deep prior experience isn't required - genuine curiosity and a willingness to help shape how the team uses these tools responsibly are what matters most
- 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.
- We're Excited If You Have
Nice to have
- Identify opportunities to continuously evolve the system and tooling
- Diagnose and resolve subtle, often timing- or statistics-related issues in a highly concurrent, multi-region distributed system
- Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team
- 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems - ideally including at least one system you built substantially from the ground up
Compensation
- For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,000 - $408,000 annually.
Benefits
- You're curious about applying AI - whether that means using AI to monitor system health, triage issues or develop agentic workflows
Company info
- Roku's Ad Serving Team builds and operates the real-time advertising platform that powers all of Roku's ad monetization across video, display, and native ad formats.
- Within Ad Serving, the Demand Bidder team owns the high throughput and low latency systems responsible for serving relevant ads for tens of thousands of campaigns through targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, measurement and more.
- Every millisecond and every decision carries direct, measurable revenue impact, and the team operates with the high engineering rigor that this demands.
- As we onboard a rapid wave of new businesses, we are actively scaling and advancing our architecture - including state of the art pacing engine, scoring/ML engine, modularizing designed for agentic development.
This listing is sourced directly from Roku's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.