Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure
Roku
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
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.
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 you 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.
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
WHAT'S ROKU'S APPROACH TO HYBRID WORKING?
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.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE 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
[employeerelations@roku.com?subject=Job%20Application%20Accommodations].
WHAT SHOULD I KNOW ABOUT ROKU'S 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 [https://www.weareroku.com/factsheet].
By providing your information, you acknowledge that you want Roku to contact you
about job roles, that you have read Roku's Applicant Privacy Notice
[https://www.weareroku.com/roku-job-applicant-privacy-notice-for-job-applicants],
and understand that Roku will use your information as described in that notice.
If you do not wish to receive any communications from Roku regarding this role
or similar roles in the future, you may unsubscribe at any time by emailing
WorkforcePrivacy@Roku.com
[workforceprivacy@roku.com?subject=Unsubscribe%20Request%20].
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