Senior Software Engineer – Live & VOD Video Infrastructure

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help design and build large-scale video infrastructure powering Live and VOD streaming workflows at Roku. In this role, you will collaborate with video engineers to build systems responsible for ingesting, processing, and delivering large volumes of video content. You will design and maintain resilient, cloud-native services that operate continuously at scale, solving complex distributed systems challenges across high-throughput media pipelines. This position requires hands-on software development, including writing new code and maintaining existing codebases across critical video infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep experience in backend systems engineering and a passion for building reliable, performant services that directly impact how millions of users stream content. This is an opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the infrastructure that powers Roku's streaming platform.

What you 9ll be doing

• Design, build, optimize, and maintain large-scale data-stream pipelines for Live and VOD video encoding workflows running in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP
• Develop high-throughput, low-latency containerized services for video ingestion, decoding, transcoding, packaging, transport, delivery, and ad avail markers management
• Architect systems capable of consuming 24/7 video and audio streams from thousands of providers in real time
• Design resilient worker-to-worker streaming and transport mechanisms capable of handling network instability, packet loss, retransmission, and continuous data flow at scale
• Build scalable orchestration and container-management systems supporting autoscaling, fault tolerance, service recovery, and rolling deployments
• Develop advanced real-time monitoring, telemetry, logging, and alerting systems to provide operational visibility and rapid failure detection

We 7re excited if you have

• Experience building distributed backend systems and cloud-native infrastructure at scale
• Deep understanding of container orchestration, worker lifecycle management, autoscaling, resiliency, and cloud infrastructure patterns
• Experience designing systems that continuously process high-throughput data streams with strict reliability and uptime requirements
• Experience debugging networking issues, packet loss, transport instability, and distributed system failures in real-time streaming environments
• Strong programming skills in one or more of the following: Go, Java, Rust, C, C++, or Python
• Hands-on experience with media frameworks and libraries such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, or similar technologies
• Experience with GPU-accelerated encoding or hardware media pipelines
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, ECS, Nomad, or other orchestration platforms
• Experience with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or Datadog
• Experience building fault-tolerant ingest or transcoding platforms operating across multiple regions