Full Time

Senior Software Engineer, Backend Performance Engineer

Roku Seoul, South Korea
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Role snapshot

Compensation N/A
Location Seoul, South Korea

Technologies

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Job description

Teamwork makes the stream work.

 

Roku is changing how the world watches TV

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.

From your first day at Roku, you'll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. We're a fast-growing public company where no one is a bystander. We offer you the opportunity to delight millions of TV streamers around the world while gaining meaningful experience across a variety of disciplines.

 

What does the team work on?

Our ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) technology powers content identification, personalized recommendations, and advertising insights across our platform. 

The Multimedia Indexer is a critical component of our ACR infrastructure, responsible for ingesting, processing, and indexing massive volumes of multimedia content in real-time. This system handles petabytes of data and serves as the foundation for content matching, metadata enrichment, and intelligent content discovery. 

As part of this team, you'll work on systems that process millions of media fingerprint files daily, operate on cloud platforms, and maintain 99.99% uptime requirements. 

 

What is the role?

Roku is seeking an exceptional Senior Software Engineer to join the Backend Performance team, working at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, multimedia processing, and AI technologies. In this role, you will architect and implement microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, handling millions of requests per day with sub-second latency requirements. You will develop sophisticated indexing pipelines that extract audio, video, and metadata features using advanced signal processing and machine learning techniques. You will optimize systems for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency across multi-region cloud deployments. You will also integrate agentic AI and LLM capabilities into production systems to improve development workflows, enhance service operations, and build internal tooling that accelerates team velocity. Your work will directly impact millions of users globally, and this role offers a clear path for career growth into technical leadership and system architecture. This role includes participating in on-call rotation to ensure system reliability and rapid incident response. 

 

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. As a technical lead, you'll also drive AI adoption across your team, mentoring others and establishing repeatable standards that others can follow.

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, including building AI tools and agents that streamline QA testing. You know how to drive an agent, verify its output, and ramp on an unfamiliar codebase with an agent helping you.

 

What are the responsibilities of the role?

  • Design and build large-scale distributed systems that ingest, process, and index multimedia content from diverse sources across global content providers  
  • Architect and implement microservices running on Kubernetes clusters, handling millions of requests per day with sub-second latency requirements  
  • Develop indexing pipelines that extract audio, video, and metadata features from multimedia content using signal processing and machine learning techniques  
  • Integrate agentic AI and LLM capabilities to improve development workflows and enhance service operations such as automated service recovery  
  • Build and operate multi-step agents that perform production work, including detecting regressions across services, bisecting commits, proposing fixes, and generating code for team review  
  • Develop internal tooling, skills, harnesses, and services that make the engineering team faster and more effective  
  • Build 95% work output using AI with clear quality 
  • Optimize system performance for throughput, latency, and cost efficiency across multi-region cloud deployments  
  • Design and implement monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, the ELK stack, and distributed tracing  
  • Lead technical design reviews and mentor engineers on distributed systems best practices, code quality, and architectural patterns  
  • Participate in on-call rotation to ensure system reliability and rapid incident response for production services  
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives including performance optimization, cost reduction, and technical debt reduction 

 

What experience would help someone be successful in this role at Roku?

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale  
  • Strong proficiency in at least one systems programming language such as Python, C++, or Go  
  • Experience designing and implementing distributed systems with focus on scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance  
  • Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design principles with ability to make appropriate trade-offs  
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) including compute, storage, networking, and managed services  
  • Hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration using Docker and Kubernetes in production environments  
  • Proficiency with version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and modern software development practices  
  • Experience integrating Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor into development workflows or production systems  
  • Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks and agent architectures for autonomous task execution  
  • Experience with prompt engineering and LLM optimization including few-shot learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) 
  • Experience with multimodal AI models capable of processing text, image, audio, and video data 
  • Understanding of AI safety practices including content filtering, bias detection, and responsible AI deployment  
  • Strong problem-solving skills with ability to debug complex distributed systems issues  
  • Effective communication skills with ability to articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders  
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience. 

#LI-AK1

What's Roku's approach to hybrid working?

Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams generally work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are generally flexible for remote work, except for employees whose specific roles or assigned office location require five days' a week attendance.

 

What are some of the benefits?

Roku is committed to offering a diverse range of benefits as part of our compensation package to support our employees and their families. Our comprehensive benefits include global access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources. Local benefits include statutory and voluntary benefits which may include healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), life, accident, disability, commuter, and retirement options (401(k)/pension). Employees are supported in taking time off, in accordance with local leave policies and other personal needs to support their evolving work and life needs. It's important to note that not every benefit is available in all locations or for every role. For details specific to your location, please consult with your recruiter.

 

Accommodations

Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please direct your inquiries to EmployeeRelations@Roku.com.

 

What should I know about Roku's culture?

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We believe a fewer number of very talented folks can do more for less cost than a larger number of less talented teams. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's changing how the world watches TV. 

We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn't real until it is built and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002. 

To learn more about Roku, our global footprint, and how we've grown, visit https://www.weareroku.com/factsheet.

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