Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems (Streaming Platform

Roku, Inc.
UK
1 day ago
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Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Experience level
Expert
Working hours
Shift work
Job source

Tech stack

A/B Testing Artificial Intelligence Amazon Web Services Data Centers Data Stores Cursor (Graphical User Interface Elements) Memcached Redis Cloud Services Toolchain Multi-Agent Systems

Job description

Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. While we are well-positioned to help shape the future of television - including TV advertising - around the world, continued success relies on our investment in digital services. Our team is a multi-disciplinary team responsible for the architecture and implementation of services that make up Roku’s browse and discovery platform. This platform is the backbone behind The Roku Channel, offering a wide range of free and premium content and entertainment to millions of users in the US and around the world., * Build extremely large-scale platform products and services, used both by Roku engineers from across the company, and directly by consumers across millions of devices

  • Work with Product/Design teams to iterate and build software, taking a concept from ideation to its production deployment and support
  • Lead efforts to evaluate new technologies and continue to push for best practices across the entire development life cycle, including code and design reviews
  • Managing project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables
  • Participate in Agile development process, including scoping, technical design, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance, Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams generally work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are generally flexible for remote work, except for employees whose specific roles or assigned office location require five days’ a week attendance.

Requirements

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer with experience in building services at scale. With so many people relying on us for great movies, TV, and news - scaling, reliability, fallbacks, and automation of these scenarios are always at the top of our mind as we continuously add features to the platform. We work very closely with the product team and pride ourselves on quickly iterating on features from prototypes to A/B tests to eventual release to all users. It’s still early days for this platform, with plenty of challenging and interesting problems to work on.

The ideal candidate will have endless curiosity and can pair a global mindset with locally relevant execution. You should be a gritty problem solver and self-starter who can drive programs with the product and commercial teams within Roku and across external strategic partner organizations. The successful candidate will display a balance of hard and soft skills, including the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs., * Strong software development experience - Java preferably - (Python nice to have)

  • Expertise in building large-scale cloud services, ideally in AWS
  • Experience in the appropriate selection of data stores and analysis of trade-offs
  • Experience with in-memory caching layers such as Redis, Redis Cluster, Memcached, or others
  • Track record of monitoring the quality of deploys and troubleshooting of production systems
  • Strong knowledge of the end-to-end architecture of the web, from end-user device to a service in a data center
  • Master’s degree in CS, CE or equivalent experience

LI-PA1

About the company

How will I use AI at Roku?

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 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., 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.

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