Senior Staff Software Engineer: Real-Time Ad Demand & Bidding

Roku; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 195,500 - 352,100; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work schedule

Comprehensive benefits package

Accommodations support

Job summary

Roku is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to scale and evolve a high-throughput advertising platform. You will own critical subsystems, drive architecture, testing, and deployment, and work with engineers and scientists on distributed, ML-assisted decisioning.

The role emphasizes ownership, fast onboarding, and collaboration in a hybrid Boston-area environment with strong compensation and benefits. You will mentor peers and help deliver low-latency, reliable systems at scale.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Ownership of complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate.
• Ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar, large codebases and become productive fast.
• Experience evolving live, business-critical systems without downtime or correctness issues.
• Strong command of Java with knowledge of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores.
• Comfort operating in cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) at scale.
• Exposure to ML-driven techniques in production decision-making is a plus.
• Real-time bidding/ad-tech domain experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time system with strict latency requirements.
• Take end-to-end ownership of subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, evolution.
• Develop a mental model of a highly distributed production system and contribute high-leverage changes.
• Identify opportunities to evolve the system and tooling.
• Collaborate with engineers and scientists on distributed systems and ML-driven decisions.
• Diagnose timing- or statistics-related issues in a concurrent, multi-region system.
• Mentor engineers to raise engineering rigor and testing discipline.
• Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders to align across teams.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java

Algorithms

Concurrency

Performance optimization

Cloud platforms

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

Roku is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to scale and evolve a high-throughput advertising platform. You will own critical subsystems, drive architecture, testing, and deployment, and work with engineers and scientists on distributed, ML-assisted decisioning.

The role emphasizes ownership, fast onboarding, and collaboration in a hybrid Boston-area environment with strong compensation and benefits. You will mentor peers and help deliver low-latency, reliable systems at scale.