Senior Software Engineer, Video Encoding

Roku, Inc.; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Global mental health support

Financial wellness resources

Healthcare benefits

401(k)/pension options

Flexible remote work on Fridays

Job summary

Roku, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Cambridge, England to design and build large-scale video infrastructure for Live and VOD streaming workflows. The role involves collaborating with video engineers and developing resilient, cloud-native services.

The ideal candidate will have strong programming skills, experience in backend systems engineering, and a passion for building reliable services that impact millions of users' streaming experiences.

Roku offers a hybrid working model and a comprehensive benefits package to support its employees and families.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of cloud-native infrastructure patterns and distributed systems.
• Experience developing high-throughput, low-latency video streaming services.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable data-stream pipelines for Live and VOD workflows.
• Develop containerized services for video ingestion and processing.
• Build resilient systems capable of handling network instability and real-time video streams.

Skills

Backend systems engineering

Go

Java

Rust

C

C++

Python

Tools

GStreamer

FFmpeg

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

ELK

Datadog

Job description

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.

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

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 [e-mail].