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.
About the team
Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. We connect users to the streaming content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers with unique capabilities to engage consumers. Roku streaming players and Roku TV™ models are available worldwide through direct retail sales and licensing arrangements with TV brands and pay-TV operators.
About the role
We seek an outstanding, creative, and passionate Machine Learning engineer to join Roku's Recommendation team. You will be responsible for building and owning the next generation of content recommendations and other algorithms/systems that will make the experience for our many millions of Roku users 100% personalized and unique.
How will I use AI at Roku?
At Roku, we don’t just use AI, we work with it. We’re looking for an experienced Applied Machine Learning Engineer to build the recommendation intelligence powering next-generation advertising and media planning experiences.
This role will develop ML, recommendation, ranking, and optimization capabilities that use advertiser, campaign, product, audience, pricing, inventory, delivery, and performance signals to generate actionable media planning recommendations.
What are the responsibilities of the role?
- Build and productionize recommendation, ranking, and optimization systems using techniques such as collaborative filtering, learning-to-rank, embeddings, similarity modeling, and hybrid approaches
- Analyze large-scale, heterogeneous datasets to identify meaningful signals and engineer reusable, high-value features that serve multiple models and use cases
- Develop and evaluate models for batch and real-time prediction that learn from historical and live patterns, defining rigorous metrics for accuracy, ranking quality, diversity, and business impact
- Design optimization approaches for complex decision and allocation problems, balancing competing objectives against real-world business and operational constraints
- Build and evolve production ML capabilities across the full model lifecycle, including experimentation, training, versioning, deployment, serving, monitoring, and retraining
- Build scalable, reliable systems operating on large datasets and distributed infrastructure, troubleshooting complex workloads and optimizing performance
- Partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineering teams to translate ambiguous business problems into well-defined ML and optimization solutions
- Use modern AI-assisted development tools effectively and apply advances in ML where they materially improve the product, while maintaining strong engineering judgment and production quality
What experience would help someone be successful in this role at Roku?
- Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Operations Research, or a related field
- 10+ years of relevant software engineering or machine learning experience
- Strong applied ML experience in production environments
- Experience building recommendation, ranking, personalization, or decision systems
- Experience with collaborative filtering, learning-to-rank, embeddings, similarity models, or related approaches
- Experience with optimization and resource allocation problems
- Strong Python, Java, and distributed data-processing skills; Spark experience preferred
- Experience with large-scale ML infrastructure, batch and real-time inference, and low-latency serving
- Strong judgment in choosing between ML, optimization, heuristics, and rules
- Ad tech, media planning, campaign optimization, inventory forecasting, or marketplace experience is a strong plus
- AI growth mindset and demonstrated fluency with modern AI-assisted engineering tools
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 [email protected].
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.
By providing your information, you acknowledge that you want Roku to contact you about job roles, that you have read Roku's Applicant Privacy Notice, and understand that Roku will use your information as described in that notice. If you do not wish to receive any communications from Roku regarding this role or similar roles in the future, you may unsubscribe at any time by emailing [email protected].
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Experience building recommendation or decisioning systems, ideally in advertising, media, or revenue-platform environments.
- Strong understanding of modern LLMs and agentic systems, and ability to evaluate latency, cost, and quality tradeoffs.
- Solid experience with LLM and multi-agent pipelines, including prompting, tool use, orchestration, tradeoff analysis, and error handling.
- Experience deploying ML systems in production, including model serving, containerization, CI/CD, and monitoring.
- Hands-on experience with ML frameworks and tooling such as PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangGraph), feature stores, and vector databases for RAG workflows.
- Experience designing evaluation approaches for recommendation and generative systems using human review, automated/offline metrics, and online A/B testing.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and production experience in Java or Python.
- Ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into practical technical solutions and communicate tradeoffs to cross-functional partners.
- Startup or founding-engineer experience or leading fast-moving Gen AI/agentic product initiatives.
- Experience owning a business-facing or self-serve product from architecture through production deployment and operational support.
- Deeper background in recommendation systems, pricing optimization, demand forecasting, uplift/churn modelling, or quoting and optimization.
- Experience improving inference cost/latency and building responsible AI guardrails (safety, compliance, auditability, human review).
- Open-source contributions or publications in ML, recommender systems, or applied AI for revenue and decisioning.
Roku Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Roku and has not been reviewed or approved by Roku.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is positioned as competitive across many roles, with frequent emphasis on strong base and total compensation relative to market expectations. Fair-pay perception appears comparatively stronger than overall satisfaction with the broader rewards package.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is framed as a standout, with sizable employer premium contributions that can reduce employee premiums significantly depending on plan choice. Preventive care and mental-health support are also described as part of the core offering.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-off offerings are presented as broad, including paid holidays, PTO, and multiple leave categories such as bereavement and family-related leave. Self-managed or “unlimited” PTO is also described for many salaried roles, supporting flexibility in taking time off.
Roku Insights
What We Do
Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. We connect users to the streaming content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers with unique capabilities to engage consumers. Roku streaming players and Roku TV™ models are available around the world through direct retail sales and licensing arrangements with TV OEMs and service operators.
