Roku

Software Engineer, Early Careers focused on AI and UI

Roku$95K — $115K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 4-6 years of engineering experience post-education.
  • Strong foundation in systems or infrastructure, emphasizing real-time data and distributed systems.
  • Experience building and shipping complex agentic systems for user interaction.
  • Demonstrated accountability for code through design principles or review processes.
  • Insight into the current limitations of agentic systems.

Responsibilities

  • Develop multi-step agents to automate tasks and detect service regressions.
  • Create internal tools that enhance team productivity and are widely adopted.
  • Manage real-time telemetry and event processing under device constraints.
  • Tackle hardware-related agent problems that cannot be simulated on standard setups.

Benefits

  • Mentorship through Project Ahsoka for early career engineers.
  • Collaborative environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Flexible working arrangements on Fridays after in-office work Monday through Thursday.
Full Job Description
About the role

Roku is a streaming company. We are not an AI-first company and we are not going to tell you we are. What we are doing is building real agentic capability into the platform behind 100M+ streaming households, and we need engineers who can make agents work on top of systems that already carry serious load.

This is a systems engineering job first. The agent work sits on telemetry, distributed services and physical devices, and it is the systems half that makes it hard. If you have built something agentic and you also know why a schema change matters when it ships to millions of devices, this is the role for you!

About the team

Join the Roku OS Platform UI team - the engineers behind Roku's home screen, Roku Channel and other content discovery and browse experiences that greet every Roku user the moment they turn on their TV. Our work ships to hundreds of millions of devices worldwide.

We move fast and hold a high bar. Engineers on this team own features end-to-end - from the OS platform layer through Application and UI to cloud integration - and collaborate closely with product, design, and cross-functional engineering partners to bring ambitious ideas to production at scale.

What you will work on
  • Multi-step agents that do real work in production. Detecting regressions across services, bisecting the commits that caused them, proposing fixes, generating and reviewing code that other engineers review and merge.
  • Internal tooling that your colleagues actually adopt. Skills, harnesses and services that make the team faster, rather than demos that get admired once.
  • Real-time telemetry and event processing at streaming scale, under the CPU and memory constraints that come with shipping to devices in people's homes.
  • Agent problems that only exist when there is hardware in the loop: physical feedback, device fleets, and signals you cannot simulate on a laptop.

What we are looking for
  • Up to 4/6 years of professional engineering experience since you finished studying.
  • Strong systems or infrastructure fundamentals. Real-time data, telemetry, distributed systems, platforms, or device work. This is the part we will not compromise on.
  • Something agentic that you have built and shipped, and that other people use. A work project or a serious personal one, and multi-step rather than a wrapper around a chat window. Come ready to talk about what it does and what broke.
  • A clear account of how you stay accountable for code you did not type. Design-first, review discipline, your own gates. We do not mind which, as long as it is yours, and you can explain it.
  • A view on where agents are not good enough yet and why
  • The existing right to work in the US. We are not able to sponsor visas for this role.

How we interview

Working fluently with AI tools is an explicit expectation for this role, so we assess it directly rather than asking you to describe it. The loop includes a hands-on engineering exercise on an unfamiliar codebase, using the tools you would normally reach for. We are watching how you approach a problem you have not seen before, not whether you have memorized an API.

Project Ahsoka

This role sits inside Project Ahsoka, our program for early career engineers building agentic systems. It is a defined program rather than a label: you are paired with a mentor, you join a squad team with the other Ahsoka engineers, and you become an AI hiring sponsor, which means you help set the bar for the people who come after you.

Location and work model

San Jose, California

Roku engineering works in the office Monday to Thursday, with a flexible Friday.

We are not asking you to be in the office five days a week, and we are not going to pretend the role is remote.

About Roku

Roku is an American consumer electronics company founded in 2002. The company is best known for its streaming devices that allow users to access internet-based video content on their televisions. Roku's devices are available in several models and are sold in the United States and other countries. The company also offers a streaming service called The Roku Channel that features a selection of movies and TV shows. Roku went public in 2017 and is traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Learn more about Roku
Size
3,000 employees
Market Cap
$5.5 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$17.5 million
Founded
2002
5 Year Trend
+47.3%
Revenue
$1.7 billion
NASDAQ

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