Staff Software Engineer (Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform)

Segment (Twilio); New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Roku in New York is seeking a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to design, build, and operate core components of a real-time advertising platform with high throughput and low latency.

You will own subsystems end-to-end, mentor teammates, and collaborate with data scientists on ML-driven decisions, with emphasis on reliability and scalable architecture. Located in New York, the role requires strong distributed systems and cloud engineering experience.

Qualifications

• 10+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Ability to own complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, and iterate in production.
• Rapidly ramp on unfamiliar, large codebases and contribute quickly.
• Refactor live, business-critical systems without downtime.
• Strong Java foundations: data structures, concurrency, and performance.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core components of a real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements.
• Take end-to-end ownership of subsystems, including architecture, testing, deployment, and on-call.
• Develop a mental model of a highly distributed production system and contribute at high leverage points.
• Mentor engineers, raise testing discipline, and improve operational excellence across the team.
• Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders to align engineering, product, and business goals.

Skills

Distributed systems

Java proficiency

End-to-end ownership

Cloud platforms

Ad-tech domain

AI tool usage

Performance optimization

Education

B.S./M.S. in CS or related

Job description

Overview

Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) in Roku’s Ad Serving team. This role focuses on scaling and evolving a high-throughput, low-latency real-time advertising platform that supports video, display, and native ad formats. The Demand Bidder subsystem drives decisions across campaigns with strong emphasis on engineering rigor, reliability, and performance.

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 specific subsystems including architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and long-term evolution.
• Develop a mental model of a highly distributed production system and contribute at high leverage points.
• Identify opportunities to evolve the system and tooling to improve performance and reliability.
• Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making.
• Diagnose and resolve timing- or statistics-related issues in a highly concurrent, multi-region environment.
• Mentor other engineers and raise engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team.
• Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems; ideally including at least one system built substantially from the ground up.
• Proven ability to own complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback.
• Ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive rapidly.
• Experience evolving and refactoring live, business-critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness.
• Strong command of Java, with solid foundations in algorithms, data structures, concurrency/multi-threading, and performance optimization.
• Practical experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming systems, and SQL/NoSQL datastores.
• Experience operating in cloud infrastructure (GCP or AWS) at scale.
• Experience or exposure to applying statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems is a plus.
• Real-time bidding/ad-tech domain experience is a plus; other high-stakes, low-latency domains are also valued.
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience (B.S. or M.S.).
• High ownership, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort operating with ambiguity; collaborative and team-oriented; open to feedback.
• Experience using AI coding assistants in real production work and an interest in responsible, effective AI tool usage.

Location note: this role is based in New York.