Senior Data Engineer - Advertising Engineering

What does the team work on?

The Data Foundations team plays a critical role in supporting Roku Ads business intelligence and analytics. The team is responsible for developing and managing foundational datasets designed to serve the operational and analytical needs of the broader organisation. The team's mission is carried out through three focus areas: acting as the interface between data producers and consumers, simplifying data architecture, and creating tools in a standardised way.

What is the role?

We are seeking a talented and experienced Senior Software Engineer with a strong background in big data technologies, including Apache Spark and Apache Airflow. This hybrid role bridges software and data engineering, requiring expertise in designing, building, and maintaining scalable systems for both application development and data processing. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and manage robust, production-grade, large-scale data systems. The ideal candidate is a proactive self-starter with a deep understanding of high-scale data services and a commitment to excellence.

How will I use AI at Roku?

At Roku, AI agents do most of the keystroke-level coding. Engineers act as the technical leads for those agents — setting context, planning work, verifying outputs, and recovering when the agent goes off course. If you are excited about working this way, we want to talk to you.

At Roku, we're embracing AI as a powerful tool to amplify human creativity, accelerate innovation, and deliver better results for our customers. Across teams, we're exploring how AI can enhance our work—and we're only looking for people who are curious, adaptable, and excited to grow alongside these technologies.

What are the responsibilities of the role?

Big Data Engineering:

• Design, develop, and maintain data pipelines and ETL workflows using Apache Spark, Apache Airflow
• Optimise data storage, retrieval, and processing systems to ensure reliability, scalability, and performance
• Develop and fine-tune complex queries and data processing jobs for large-scale datasets
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and improve data systems for minimal downtime and maximum efficiency

Software Development:

• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code, ensuring adherence to best practices through code reviews

Collaboration & Mentorship:

• Partner with data scientists, software engineers, and other teams to deliver integrated, high-quality solutions
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, promoting best practices in data engineering

AI-augmented engineering & intelligent data interfaces:

• Apply modern AI-assisted development practices responsibly (for example assisted code review, test generation, and documentation) while maintaining production quality, security, and compliance standards
• Design and evolve semantic search and retrieval over internal metadata (datasets, lineage, dashboards, runbooks): embeddings, indexing, and guardrailed query interfaces where they improve engineer and analyst productivity
• Stay current on responsible AI expectations relevant to advertising data: privacy, PII handling, access control, auditability, and human-in-the-loop review for high-risk automation

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

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 10+ years of experience in software and/or data engineering with expertise in big data technologies such as Apache Spark, Apache Airflow and Trino
• Strong understanding of SOLID principles and distributed systems architecture
• Proven experience in distributed data processing, data warehousing, and real-time data pipelines
• Advanced SQL skills, with expertise in query optimisation for large datasets
• Exceptional problem-solving abilities and the capacity to work independently or collaboratively
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• 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
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and containerisation tools like Docker and Kubernetes (preferred)
• Familiarity with additional big data technologies, including Hadoop, Kafka, and Trino (preferred)
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or Scala (preferred)
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform) (preferred)
• Expertise in data modelling, schema design, and data visualisation tools (preferred)

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