Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure

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, reliable applications, tools, and automation frameworks to efficiently handle 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 Roku's Live and VOD streaming workflows. In this role, you will collaborate with video engineers to build systems that ingest, process, and deliver 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 critical video infrastructure codebases. 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. For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $285,000 - $345,000 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 will I use AI at Roku? At Roku, we don’t just use AI, we work with it. AI agents and smart tools help power drafts, analysis, and repetitive workflows, while our people bring direction, judgment, and accountability. We’re looking for curious, adaptable builders who can show how they’ve used AI or automation to move faster, raise the bar, and scale their impact. 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. And you can describe projects where you shipped real work with these tools. You know how to drive an agent, verify its output, and ramp on an unfamiliar codebase with an agent helping you. What you'll be doing p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">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 p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Develop high-throughput, low-latency containerized services for video ingestion, decoding, transcoding, packaging, transport, delivery, and ad avail markers management p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Architect systems capable of consuming 24/7 video and audio streams from thousands of providers in real time p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Design resilient worker-to-worker streaming and transport mechanisms capable of handling network instability, packet loss, retransmission, and continuous data flow at scale p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Build scalable orchestration and container-management systems supporting autoscaling, fault tolerance, service recovery, and rolling deployments p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Develop advanced real-time monitoring, telemetry, logging, and alerting systems to provide operational visibility and rapid failure detection We're excited if you have p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Experience building distributed backend systems and cloud-native infrastructure at scale p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Deep understanding of container orchestration, worker lifecycle management, autoscaling, resiliency, and cloud infrastructure patterns p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Experience designing systems that continuously process high-throughput data streams with strict reliability and uptime requirements p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Experience debugging networking issues, packet loss, transport instability, and distributed system failures in real-time streaming environments p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Hands-on experience with media frameworks and libraries such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, or similar technologies p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Experience with GPU-accelerated encoding or hardware media pipelines p]:inline" data-streamdown="list-item">Familiarity with Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or other orchestration platforms p]:inline" d