Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform

Roku • Boston, MA

3d • $195,500 - $352,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

Roku is hiring a Senior Software Engineer at Staff scope for its Demand Bidder team within the Ad Serving organization. The team builds and operates real-time advertising systems that monetize Roku across video, display, and native formats. Demand Bidder serves relevant ads for tens of thousands of campaigns using targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, and measurement. The platform is high-throughput and low-latency, with individual decisions carrying measurable revenue impact.

The role will help scale and evolve this large system as Roku onboards new businesses. Current priorities include advancing the pacing and scoring/ML engines, modularizing the architecture for agentic development, and raising reliability as the business grows. The successful candidate will quickly learn the complex production ecosystem and take ownership of important initiatives.

Roku generally follows a hybrid work approach, with teams working in the office Monday through Thursday and Fridays generally flexible for remote work. Some roles or office locations may require five days of in-office attendance.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems; ideally including a system built substantially from the ground up.
• Demonstrated ability to own complex systems end to end, including design, development, operation, on-call support, and iteration based on production feedback.
• Ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive.
• Experience evolving and refactoring live, business-critical systems without compromising uptime or correctness.
• Strong command of Java and a solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, concurrency or multithreading, and performance optimization.
• Practical experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging or streaming systems, and SQL or NoSQL datastores.
• Comfort operating cloud infrastructure at scale, such as GCP or AWS.
• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• High ownership, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort operating with ambiguity.
• Collaborative, team-oriented approach; openness to others' approaches and ability to work across teams.
• Experience using AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Cursor, or similar in real production work to accelerate design, implementation, debugging, and understanding unfamiliar codebases.
• Ability to explain informed opinions on effective use of AI coding assistants and maintain a high standard of correctness and understanding of shipped work.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques in production decision-making systems.
• Real-time bidding or ad-tech domain experience.
• Deep experience in adjacent high-stakes, low-latency domains such as trading systems, large-scale ranking or recommendation, matchmaking, or risk and fraud systems.
• Curiosity about applying AI to system health monitoring, issue triage, or agentic workflows, and willingness to help shape responsible use of these tools.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements.
• Own specific subsystems end to end, including architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call support, and long-term evolution.
• Develop a working understanding of a highly distributed, complex production system and make high-leverage contributions.
• Identify opportunities to continuously evolve the system and its tooling.
• Partner with engineers and applied scientists working across distributed systems and statistical or ML-driven decision-making.
• Diagnose and resolve subtle issues, including timing- or statistics-related issues, in a highly concurrent, multi-region distributed system.
• Mentor engineers and raise standards for engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence.
• Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners.

Benefits

• Health insurance, including medical, dental, and vision options.
• Equity awards.
• Life insurance.
• Disability benefits.
• Parental leave.
• Wellness benefits, including access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources.
• Paid time off in accordance with local leave policies and personal needs.
• Commuter benefits.
• Retirement options, including 401(k) or pension, depending on location.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior