Senior Backend Architect – AI-Driven Distributed Systems

Roku; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Global mental health support

Financial wellness resources

Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

401(k) / pension

Job summary

Roku is seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join the Backend Performance team, working at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, multimedia processing, and AI technologies. In this role, you will architect and implement microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, handling millions of requests per day with sub-second latency.

You will develop indexing pipelines that extract audio, video, and metadata features using ML techniques.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Python, C++, or Go and experience with distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS/GCP and containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Experience integrating LLMs and agent frameworks into production workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design and build large-scale distributed systems that ingest, process, and index multimedia content from diverse sources across global content providers.
• Architect and implement microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, handling millions of requests per day with sub-second latency requirements.
• Develop indexing pipelines that extract audio, video, and metadata features from multimedia content using signal processing and machine learning techniques.
• Integrate agentic AI and LLM capabilities to improve development workflows and enhance service operations such as automated service recovery.
• Build and operate multi-step agents that perform production work, including detecting regressions across services, bisecting commits, proposing fixes, and generating code for team review.
• Develop internal tooling, skills, harnesses, and services that make the engineering team faster and more effective.
• Build 95% work output using AI with clear quality.
• Optimize system performance for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency across multi-region cloud deployments.
• Design and implement monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, the ELK stack, and distributed tracing.
• Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers on distributed systems best practices, code quality, and architectural patterns.
• Participate in on-call rotation to ensure system reliability and rapid incident response for production services.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives including performance optimization, cost reduction, and technical debt reduction.

Skills

Distributed systems

Python

C++

Go

Kubernetes

Docker

LLM integration

Education

Bachelor's in CS/Engineering

Tools

Git

CI/CD

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

Roku is seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join the Backend Performance team, working at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, multimedia processing, and AI technologies. In this role, you will architect and implement microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, handling millions of requests per day with sub-second latency.

You will develop indexing pipelines that extract audio, video, and metadata features using ML techniques.