Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform

Roku • New York, NY

3d • $195,000 - $408,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Roku is hiring a Senior Software Engineer at Staff scope for the Demand Bidder team within its Ad Serving Platform. The team builds and operates high-throughput, low-latency systems that serve relevant ads across tens of thousands of campaigns through targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, and measurement. The role will help scale and evolve this real-time advertising platform as Roku onboards new businesses and advances its architecture, including its pacing and scoring/ML engines and modularization for agentic development.

The successful candidate will quickly develop a working understanding of the complex production ecosystem and take ownership of key initiatives. They will design, build, test, deploy, operate, and evolve core components and subsystems, while maintaining reliability, correctness, and strict latency requirements. The role also involves working with engineers and applied scientists, mentoring teammates, and aligning with engineering, product, and business partners.

Roku generally has teams work in the office Monday through Thursday, with Fridays generally flexible for remote work. Some roles or office locations may require five days per week in the office.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience owning 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; low ego; openness to other approaches and critical feedback.
• Experience using AI coding assistants such as Claude Code or Cursor in real production work to accelerate design, implementation, debugging, and understanding unfamiliar codebases.
• Ability to describe informed opinions on leveraging AI coding assistants and to maintain a high bar for correctness and understanding of shipped work.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building at least one large-scale, low-latency distributed system substantially from the ground up.
• Exposure to applying statistical, control-theory, or ML-driven techniques within production decision-making systems.
• Real-time bidding or ad-tech domain experience.
• 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 monitor system health, triage issues, or develop agentic workflows.

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.
• Build a working mental model 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 at the intersection of 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 other engineers and raise engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team.
• Communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners.

Benefits

• Health insurance, including healthcare coverage that may include medical, dental, and vision.
• 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 may be available depending on location.
• Retirement options, including 401(k) or pension, may be available depending on location.

What This Job Offers

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