Senior Software Engineer, Advanced Development

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.

The Advanced Development team pushes the boundaries beyond product lines to build genuinely new things. We think independently of standard shipping cadences and timelines, working on foundational technologies that could impact every Roku device in the future and on ideas that no one's seen in their living room yet.

In this role, you will be part of the team responsible for driving modular enhancements of the RokuOS architecture and providing new ways for channel partners to leverage the modernized experience. You will implement new APIs for parts of Roku's system software and apply your refactoring expertise to ensure API capabilities satisfy all requirements without privileged workarounds. This work can include anything from optimizing common libraries to redesigning the APIs and development environment used by third-party apps running on the Roku platform.

You will collaborate closely with cross-functional engineering teams to deliver high-performance, ultra-reliable software  ideal candidate is a forward thinker with endless curiosity, a strong bias for action, and a demonstrated commitment to using AI to accelerate engineering outcomes. You will have a direct impact on the architecture of Roku OS, which ships worldwide and runs on devices in more than 85 million streaming households.

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 you 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.

• Be an agentic engineer to evolve parts of the RokuOS system software that exposes fundamental APIs for the Roku platform, used internally and externally for higher-level SDKs
• Demonstrate excellence in C++ development and deliver high-performance, ultra-reliable software
• Use software design skills to deliver extensive changes to an existing codebase that are modular and maintainable
• Design and implement new APIs that enable channel partners to leverage modernized platform capabilities
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure API designs satisfy all requirements and adhere to platform standards
• Apply refactoring expertise to improve existing system software architecture without introducing privileged workarounds
• Leverage AI tools and agentic workflows to accelerate development, improve code quality, and scale engineering impact

• 8+ years of experience in C/C++ software development, including firmware and full-stack systems, architecture, and API design
• 2+ years of Linux application development experience
• Advanced AI proficiency, including the ability to build repeatable agentic workflows, design autonomous AI agents, and independently complete complex tasks using reasoning and planning capabilities — beyond basic prompt usage
• Comfort with multi-threaded and multi-process development
• Strong analytical mindset with attention to detail and a self-driven approach to problem solving
• Bachelor's and/or master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related…