What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer - Business Applications and Machine Learning position at Roku?
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 role
Roku Advertising powers a multi-billion-dollar business and operates at the scale of one of the largest CTV advertising platforms in the US. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to drive the next evolution of how Roku’s advertising business applications operate, partnering closely with advertising business stakeholders, product, architecture, and engineering teams to transform operational workflows using machine learning, GenAI, and agentic AI systems.
This role is focused on applying AI across Roku’s advertising business applications, including pre-sales, booking, campaign management, delivery, optimization, and revenue operations. You will build intelligent systems and agents that recommend, automate, orchestrate, and optimize decisions across complex operational workflows and interconnected business applications.
We are looking for someone who combines strong software engineering and architectural fundamentals with practical experience building and scaling AI-native systems in production environments. The ideal candidate has experience building large-scale enterprise business applications and operational systems in traditional software engineering environments and has more recently applied GenAI, LLMs, and agentic AI systems to modernize and automate complex workflows.
This is not a research-only role. You will own production-grade AI and agentic systems that create measurable business impact, influence architecture and technical direction for AI-native operations, and help shape how AI capabilities are embedded across Roku’s advertising business applications.
For Massachusetts Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $178,500 - $290,500 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
- Drive the AI-native transformation of Roku’s advertising business applications, identifying high-leverage opportunities and contributing to roadmap, architecture, and system design across multiple teams.
- Work closely with advertising business stakeholders to identify operational challenges, simplify complex workflows, and translate business pain points into scalable AI and agentic system solutions.
- Design and deliver production-grade AI systems end-to-end, including recommendation, ranking, forecasting, anomaly detection, workflow automation, and multi-agent or agent-to-agent orchestration embedded directly within operational platforms and business applications.
- Apply GenAI and LLM technologies where they create measurable value, including RAG pipelines, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks, memory-aware systems, and guardrails, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and operational outcomes over hype.
- Partner deeply with engineers, data scientists, product managers, architects, and business teams to translate ambiguous operational problems into practical production solutions that drive measurable business impact.
- Build evaluation and observability frameworks covering precision and recall, calibration, drift detection, human-in-the-loop systems, operational metrics, dashboards, and SLOs that connect AI system performance to business outcomes.
- Start from the needs of internal engineers and business operators, bringing a creative and strategic approach to simplifying systems and introducing pragmatic, high-impact solutions.
- Provide technical leadership within the broader AI and engineering ecosystem, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and helping establish engineering best practices for AI-native application development.
- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8 years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling large enterprise business applications and operational platforms, with recent experience applying AI, GenAI, and agentic systems within production enterprise environments.
- Proven experience building and scaling production AI systems, including LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, retrieval systems, workflow orchestration, and multi-agent or agent-based architectures.
- Strong foundation in machine learning and statistical modeling techniques, including classification, regression, clustering, anomaly detection, ranking, forecasting, recommendation systems, and NLP use cases.
- Deep understanding of machine learning fundamentals, including feature engineering, model evaluation, bias-variance tradeoffs, offline vs. online metrics, and production monitoring.
- Strong software engineering, architecture, and system design skills, with experience building reliable, scalable, and maintainable enterprise business applications, workflow-driven systems, and operational platforms.
- Demonstrated technical leadership, including influencing architecture and technical direction across teams, mentoring engineers, and driving execution in ambiguous environments.
- Experience in advertising, marketplaces, e-commerce, travel, or similar operationally complex, data-rich platforms is a strong plus.
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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Salary : $178,500 - $290,500