Staff Software Engineer (Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Equity awards

Life insurance

Disability benefits

Parental leave

Wellness benefits

Paid time off

Job summary

Roku, Inc. in Massachusetts is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to scale a real‑time, distributed decisioning platform powering ad monetization across formats. You will own subsystems end‑to‑end, mentor peers, and collaborate with applied scientists to improve latency and reliability.

The role emphasizes rapid onboarding to complex codebases, strong Java performance skills, and a track record of building low‑latency systems in a high‑throughput environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years designing, building, and operating large‑scale, low‑latency distributed systems.
• Proven ownership of complex systems end‑to‑end: design, build, operate, on‑call, iterate.
• Ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar, large codebases with minimal onboarding.
• Experience evolving live, business‑critical systems without downtime.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large‑scale, real‑time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
• Take end‑to‑end ownership of subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on‑call, long‑term evolution
• Build a working mental model of a highly distributed production system and contribute substantially
• Identify opportunities to evolve the system and tooling
• Partner with engineers and applied scientists at the intersection of distributed systems and ML‑driven decisions
• Diagnose and resolve timing or statistics issues in a concurrent, multi‑region system
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operations
• Communicate clearly with technical and non‑technical stakeholders to align across teams

Skills

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Communication

Leadership

Tools

Java

Algorithms

Data structures

Concurrency

Performance optimization

Job description

About the Team

Roku's Ad Serving Team builds and operates the real‑time advertising platform that powers all of Roku's ad monetization across video, display, and native ad formats. Within Ad Serving, the Demand Bidder team owns the high throughput and low latency systems responsible for serving relevant ads for tens of thousands of campaigns through targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, measurement and more.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to help scale and evolve this platform. Demand Bidder is a large, high‑throughput system driving our next phase of growth. As we onboard a rapid wave of new businesses, we are actively scaling and advancing our architecture – including state of the art pacing engine, scoring/ML engine, modularizing designed for agentic development – to meet rigorous reliability standards.

Compensation

For Massachusetts only – the estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,500 - $352,100 annually. Compensation packages are based on factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, certifications, and specific geographical location. This role is eligible for health insurance, equity awards, life insurance, disability benefits, parental leave, wellness benefits, and paid time off.

How you’ll use AI at Roku

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. You can describe projects where you shipped real work with these tools, drive an agent, verify its output, and ramp on an unfamiliar codebase with an agent helping you.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large‑scale, real‑time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
• Take end‑to‑end ownership of specific subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on‑call, and long‑term evolution
• Build a working mental model of a highly distributed, complex production system, and make high‑leverage contributions
• Identify opportunities to continuously evolve the system and tooling
• Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML‐driven decision‑making
• Diagnose and resolve subtle, often timing‑ or statistics‑related issues in a highly concurrent, multi‑region distributed system
• Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners

We’re Excited If You Have

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large‑scale, low‑latency distributed systems – ideally including at least one system you built substantially from the ground up
• A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end‑to‑end: design, build, operate, on‑call, and iterate based on production feedback
• Proven ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive fast – you enjoy the "figure it out" part of the job as much as the "build it" part
• Experience evolving and refactoring live, business‑critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness
• Strong command of Java, with a solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency/multi‑threading, and performance optimization