Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure in Cambridge

Teamwork makes the stream work. Roku is changing how the world watches TV. Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and we've set our sights on powering every television in the world. Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Our mission is to be the TV streaming platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem. We connect consumers to the content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers unique capabilities to engage consumers. From your first day at Roku, you'll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. We're a fast-growing public company where no one is a bystander. We offer you the opportunity to delight millions of TV streamers around the world while gaining meaningful experience across a variety of disciplines.

About the team: Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. As we strive to influence the future of television globally, including TV advertising, the ongoing success depends heavily on our investment in the Content Management System. With Roku providing millions of movies, episodes, news, and channels, the Content Management System plays a vital role in managing content ingestion, selection, enrichment, and curation. We are seeking engineers capable of developing, designing, and deploying highly scalable, dependable applications, tools, and automation frameworks essential for efficiently handling the vast volume of content in our pipeline.

About the role: We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help design and build large-scale video infrastructure powering Live and VOD streaming workflows at Roku. In this role, you will collaborate with video engineers to build systems responsible for ingesting, processing, and delivering large volumes of video content. You will design and maintain resilient, cloud-native services that operate continuously at scale, solving complex distributed systems challenges across high-throughput media pipelines. This position requires hands-on software development, including writing new code and maintaining existing codebases across critical video infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep experience in backend systems engineering and a passion for building reliable, performant services that directly impact how millions of users stream content. This is an opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the infrastructure that powers Roku's streaming platform.

What you'll be doing:

• Design, build, optimize, and maintain large-scale data-stream pipelines for Live and VOD video encoding workflows running in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP.
• Develop high-throughput, low-latency containerized services for video ingestion, decoding, transcoding, packaging, transport, delivery, and ad avail markers management.
• Architect systems capable of consuming 24/7 video and audio streams from thousands of providers in real time.
• Design resilient worker-to-worker streaming and transport mechanisms capable of handling network instability, packet loss, retransmission, and continuous data flow at scale.
• Build scalable orchestration and container-management systems supporting autoscaling, fault tolerance, service recovery, and rolling deployments.
• Develop advanced real-time monitoring, telemetry, logging, and alerting systems to provide operational visibility and rapid failure detection.

We're excited if you have:

• Experience building distributed backend systems and cloud-native infrastructure at scale.
• Deep understanding of container orchestration, worker lifecycle management, autoscaling, resiliency, and cloud infrastructure patterns.
• Experience designing systems that continuously process high-throughput data streams with strict reliability and uptime requirements.
• Experience debugging networking issues, packet loss, transport instability, and distributed system failures in real-time streaming environments.
• Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python.
• Hands-on experience with media frameworks and libraries such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, or similar technologies.
• Experience with GPU-accelerated encoding or hardware media pipelines.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or other orchestration platforms.
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or Datadog.
• Experience building fault-tolerant ingest or transcoding platforms operating across multiple regions.

Our Hybrid Work Approach: Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are flexible for remote work except for employees whose roles are required to be in the office five days a week or employees who are in offices with a five day in office policy.

Benefits: Roku is committed to offering a diverse range of benefits as part of our compensation package to support our employees and their families. Our comprehensive benefits include global access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources. Local benefits include statutory and voluntary benefits which may include healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), life, accident, disability, commuter, and retirement options (401(k)/pension). Employees are supported in taking time off, in accordance with local leave policies and other personal needs to support their evolving work and life needs. It's important to note that not every benefit is available in all locations or for every role. For details specific to your location, please consult with your recruiter.

Accommodations: Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please direct your inquiries to EmployeeRelations@Roku.com.

The Roku Culture: Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We believe a fewer number of very talented folks can do more for less cost than a larger number of less talented teams. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's changing how the world watches TV. We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn't real until it is built and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002.