Senior Software Engineer: Real-Time Ad Auctions & Marketplace

Roku; Cambridge; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Global benefits

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Roku Cambridge is expanding its Ad Auctions team. You will help build real-time auction and marketplace systems on the JVM, designing end-to-end solutions that optimize multiple objectives for advertisers, publishers, viewers, and Roku.

You’ll work directly with a hiring manager and senior engineers, moving from whiteboard design to production code within the same week and delivering measurable revenue impact through robust, low-latency services and AI-enabled tooling.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building production software with strong systems judgement.
• Production experience in Java or JVM languages; willing to ramp on Java.
• Strong maths, algorithms, probability applied to real systems.
• Demonstrated AI and agentic-tooling fluency.

Responsibilities

• Design and build components of Roku's real-time ad auction and marketplace systems
• Own the multi-objective optimisation at the core of the auction, balancing stakeholders
• Own development work end to end, from framing the problem through production rollout
• Build and operate JVM services where latency and reliability are requirements
• Use probability, statistics and experimentation to test changes before and after launch
• Work with AI tooling as a normal part of how you design, build, test and review
• Explain technical trade-offs clearly to engineering and cross-functional partners

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Maths / algorithms

Probability

AI tooling fluency

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Agent frameworks

Job description

Roku Cambridge is expanding its Ad Auctions team. You will help build real-time auction and marketplace systems on the JVM, designing end-to-end solutions that optimize multiple objectives for advertisers, publishers, viewers, and Roku.

You’ll work directly with a hiring manager and senior engineers, moving from whiteboard design to production code within the same week and delivering measurable revenue impact through robust, low-latency services and AI-enabled tooling.