Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform
rokuEast Boston (MA)
Staff Software Engineer, Demand Bidder, Ad Serving Platform
Posted today
rokuEast Boston (MA)
SENIORITY
Lead
About the role
Overview:
As a Senior Software Engineer on Roku’s Ad Serving / Demand Bidder team, you will help scale a high-throughput, real-time decisioning platform. You’ll own end-to-end subsystems, shaping architecture, testing, deployment, and long-term evolution to support growing advertisers and campaigns. You’ll work with engineers and scientists at the intersection of distributed systems and ML-driven decisioning, driving performance and reliability. This role offers meaningful impact on revenue and product scale in a fast-paced, collaborative culture. Compensation / Benefits health insurance equity awards life insurance disability benefits parental leave wellness benefits
Responsibilities:
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 subsystems: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, on-call, and evolution Build mental model of a highly distributed production system and contribute at high leverage Identify opportunities to evolve system and tooling Collaborate with engineers and applied scientists on distributed systems and ML-driven decision-making Diagnose and resolve timing- or statistics-related issues in a concurrent, multi-region system Mentor engineers and raise engineering rigor, testing discipline, and operational excellence Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders to align across teams Onboard new initiatives and drive alignment with product and business partners
Key requirements:
10+ years designing, building, and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems Track record of owning complex systems end-to-end (design, build, operate, on-call, iterate) Ability to ramp quickly on unfamiliar, large codebases Experience evolving live, business-critical systems without downtime Strong command of Java, algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and performance optimization Experience with distributed caching, high-throughput messaging/streaming, and SQL/NoSQL datastores Experience operating in cloud infra (GCP or AWS) at scale Bachelor or Master in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience Ownership mindset, self-motivation, critical thinking, and comfort with ambiguity Collaborative, low-ego attitude and readiness to work across teams Experience using AI coding assistants in production to accelerate design and debugging Interest in applying AI for monitoring, triage, or agentic workflows ownership and accountability collaboration across teams clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders Java distributed systems design and optimization real-time / low-latency engineering
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