Staff Software Engineer - Real-Time Ad Bidding Platform

Roku; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 244,800 - 408,000; 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 is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to scale and evolve the real-time bidding and decisioning platform within the Ad Serving Team. You will own critical subsystems, architect scalable components, and collaborate across teams to advance latency-sensitive software.

You will work with Java, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure, applying state-of-the-art techniques and ML-driven insights, with strong emphasis on ownership and quality.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Proven ability to own complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate from production feedback.
• Strong command of Java, with a foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS) at scale.
• Ad-tech domain experience or real-time bidding is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system.
• Take end-to-end ownership of subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, evolution.
• Build a mental model of a complex production system and contribute high-leverage improvements.
• Identify opportunities to evolve the system and tooling.
• Partner with engineers and scientists on distributed systems and ML-driven decisions.
• Diagnose timing/statistics-related issues in a concurrent, multi-region system.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering rigor and operational excellence.
• Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive alignment.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Low-latency

Algorithms

Data structures

Concurrency

Performance optimization

Cloud (GCP/AWS)

ML in production

Leadership

Education

BS/MS CS or related

Tools

GCP

AWS

SQL

NoSQL

Redis

Kafka

Job description

Roku is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to scale and evolve the real-time bidding and decisioning platform within the Ad Serving Team. You will own critical subsystems, architect scalable components, and collaborate across teams to advance latency-sensitive software.

You will work with Java, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure, applying state-of-the-art techniques and ML-driven insights, with strong emphasis on ownership and quality.