Lead Software Engineer, Payment Platform

Roku•San Jose, CA

2d•$400,000 - $500,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. About the team Roku Pay is one of Roku's core monetization streams and is well-positioned for significant growth. Roku Pay encompasses the Pricing, Billing, and Payments ecosystems, along with many other integrations that strive to deliver a great experience for our partners and consumers. We are rebuilding our platform to support our growth plans in both domestic and international markets. As part of this exercise, you will have an opportunity to build out a very scalable, performant, and available system that can influence Roku's growth path tremendously, while being on the bleeding edge of technologies, crafting microservices, scaling cloud deployments, etc. About the role As Lead Engineer, you'll lead the evaluation and implementation of new technologies and designs, continually assessing emerging tools and seeking innovative solutions to both existing and new challenges. You'll engage in architectural discussions across multiple teams, influence the roadmap, and own key projects and initiatives, providing the technical leadership and expertise needed to drive highly available, scalable platform capabilities. This role sets the standard for engineering excellence—establishing clear expectations and leading by hands-on example. You'll be an evangelist for best practices across every function, including development, QA, and infrastructure/ops, as well as a champion for platform innovation and reuse. While you'll stay actively involved in code and design reviews, this remains a deeply technical position: you're expected to be heavily hands-on with agentic coding.

Requirements

Hands-on experience with AI-assisted and agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) is required, including the ability to effectively delegate, review, and integrate AI-generated code within a production workflow
15+ years of experience in large-scale backend services, specifically within payment system architecture and implementation, or related professional industry experience
A good understanding of various payment flows is required, such as payment processing, card tokenization, payment gateway integration, token vault management, etc.
Good understanding of different payment processing flows, such as sync vs async, and online vs offline
Familiar with different compliance standards, such as SOX, PCI, 3DS, etc.
Experience with the RFP (Request for Proposal) Process, proven ability to translate business needs to vendor requirements, performance of deep technical evaluation on 3rd parties vendors, and helping business selecting the right vendor to scale with the company
Strong architectural design experience, and a great track record of building a highly available and scalable payment platform
Strong expertise with cloud solutions/systems across the cloud with AWS or GCP is a must
Strong experience in designing and leading highly complex transactional systems
Strong passion for technology and adding value to the bottom line through technology
Strong expertise in Payments and billing systems is required
Strong passion & expertise in building and adopting CI/CD pipelines

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-cloud solutions is a plus; ability to offer technical guidance to design, deploy, and scale applications across multiple cloud environments

Responsibilities

Use agentic AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as part of your daily workflow, delegating tasks to AI, reviewing and refining AI-generated code, and integrating it into production
Build and ship features using AI coding agents—delegating implementation, reviewing output, and owning the quality of what makes it to production
Own the building of platform features, driving work directly with product and other engineering teams
Own the design and implementation of shared architectural layers (e.g., queuing, event systems, shared memory clusters) and libraries that can be leveraged across teams.
Evaluate emerging technologies and lead the adoption of new designs that address platform challenges
Participate in architectural discussions across teams, influence the technical roadmap, and take ownership of key initiatives
Review technical specification documents produced by the development team and mentor team members to raise the bar on quality
Stay hands-on with code and design reviews while spending the majority of your time (~70%) writing code
Champion best practices and a culture of innovation and reuse across development, QA, and infrastructure/ops