Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure

at Roku

San Jose, United States

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 we've 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, you'll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. We're 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.

About the team

Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. As we strive to influence the future of television globally, including TV advertising, the ongoing success depends heavily on our investment in the Content Management System. With Roku providing millions of movies, episodes, news, and channels, the Content Management System plays a vital role in managing content ingestion, selection, enrichment, and curation. We are seeking engineers capable of developing, designing, and deploying highly scalable, dependable applications, tools, and automation frameworks essential for efficiently handling the vast volume of content in our pipeline.

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help design and build large-scale video infrastructure powering Live and VOD streaming workflows at Roku. In this role, you will collaborate with video engineers to build systems responsible for ingesting, processing, and delivering large volumes of video content. You will design and maintain resilient, cloud-native services that operate continuously at scale, solving complex distributed systems challenges across high-throughput media pipelines. This position requires hands-on software development, including writing new code and maintaining existing codebases across critical video infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep experience in backend systems engineering and a passion for building reliable, performant services that directly impact how millions of users stream content. This is an opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the infrastructure that powers Roku's streaming platform.

For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $285,000 - $345,000 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.

What you'll be doing

Design, build, optimize, and maintain large-scale data-stream pipelines for Live and VOD video encoding workflows running in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP
Develop high-throughput, low-latency containerized services for video ingestion, decoding, transcoding, packaging, transport, delivery, and ad avail markers management
Architect systems capable of consuming 24/7 video and audio streams from thousands of providers in real time
Design resilient worker-to-worker streaming and transport mechanisms capable of handling network instability, packet loss, retransmission, and continuous data flow at scale
Build scalable orchestration and container-management systems supporting autoscaling, fault tolerance, service recovery, and rolling deployments
Develop advanced real-time monitoring, telemetry, logging, and alerting systems to provide operational visibility and rapid failure detection

We're excited if you have

Experience building distributed backend systems and cloud-native infrastructure at scale
Deep understanding of container orchestration, worker lifecycle management, autoscaling, resiliency, and cloud infrastructure patterns
Experience designing systems that continuously process high-throughput data streams with strict reliability and uptime requirements
Experience debugging networking issues, packet loss, transport instability, and distributed system failures in real-time streaming environments
Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python
Hands-on experience with media frameworks and libraries such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, or similar technologies
Experience with GPU-accelerated encoding or hardware media pipelines
Familiarity with Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or other orchestration platforms
Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or Datadog
Experience building fault-tolerant ingest or transcoding platforms operating across multiple regions

#LI-JC5

Our Hybrid Work Approach

Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are flexible for remote work except for employees whose roles are required to be in the office five days a week or employees who are in offices with a five day in office policy.

Benefits

Roku is committed to offering a diverse range of benefits as part of our compensation package to support our employees and their families. Our comprehensive benefits include global access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources. Local benefits include statutory and voluntary benefits which may include healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), life, accident, disability, commuter, and retirement options (401(k)/pension). Employees are supported in taking time off, in accordance with local leave policies and other personal needs to support their evolving work and life needs. It's important to note that not every benefit is available in all locations or for every role. For details specific to your location, please consult with your recruiter.

Accommodations

Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please direct your inquiries to EmployeeRelations@Roku.com.

The Roku Culture

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's 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. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's 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 isn't 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. 

To learn more about Roku, our global footprint, and how we've grown, visit https://www.weareroku.com/factsheet.

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