Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform

About the Team

Roku's Ad Serving Team builds and operates the real-time advertising platform that powers all of Roku’s ad monetization across video, display, and native ad formats. Within Ad Serving, the Demand Bidder team owns the high throughput and low latency systems responsible for serving relevant ads for tens of thousands of campaigns through targeting, scoring, bidding, auctions, measurement and more. Every millisecond and every decision carries direct, measurable revenue impact, and the team operates with the high engineering rigor that this demands.

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Staff scope) to help scale and evolve this platform. Demand Bidder is a large, high-throughput system driving our next phase of growth. As we onboard a rapid wave of new businesses, we are actively scaling and advancing our architecture — including state of the art pacing engine, scoring/ML engine, modularizing designed for agentic development. Our reliability bar keeps climbing alongside our business scale. We need someone who can rapidly master this intricate ecosystem and take immediate ownership of key initiatives.

For New York Only — The estimated annual salary for this position is between $195,000 – $408,000 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 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

• Design, build, and operate core components of a large-scale, real-time distributed decisioning system with strict latency requirements
• Take end-to-end ownership of specific subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and long-term evolution
• Build a working mental model of a highly distributes, complex production system, and make high-leverage contributions
• Identify opportunities to continuously evolve the system and tooling
• Partner with engineers and applied scientists working at the intersection of distributed systems and statistical/ML-driven decision-making
• Diagnose and resolve subtle, often timing- or statistics-related issues in a highly concurrent, multi-region distributed system
• Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence across the team
• Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and business partners
  
  

We're Excited If You Have

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems — ideally including at least one system you built substantially from the ground up
• A demonstrated track record of owning complex systems end-to-end: design, build, operate, on-call, and iterate based on production feedback
• Proven ability to ramp quickly into unfamiliar, complex, large codebases and become productive fast — you enjoy the “figure it out” part of the