Senior Software Engineer,  SRE

What does the team work on?

The Platform Infrastructure team ensures that all Roku systems run smoothly. These systems support over 100M+ users and billions in transaction revenue per year. We are a group of highly skilled infrastructure and software engineers who help build and operate systems at internet scale, including Platform (Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, operators, and more) and Observability (OSS/CNCF-supported observability projects). We engage with multiple teams to achieve company-impacting results.

What is the role?

We are seeking a talented and experienced SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Senior Software Engineer to help architect, build, and operate large-scale systems that stay reliable, secure, and cost-effective at internet scale. The ideal candidate takes end-to-end ownership of outcomes—treating reliability, security, cost, operability, and supportability as part of the job, not just delivering code. They bring calm, decisive incident leadership, separating mitigation from root-cause investigation and running blameless reviews that produce lasting improvements. Strong judgment and prioritization are essential, balancing roadmap delivery against operational debt, security, and compliance while clearly explaining trade-offs. This engineer pairs deep technical depth in distributed systems with broad systems thinking, and turns ambiguous objectives into executable roadmaps, epics, and backlogs. Just as important is the ability to build influence through credibility and sound reasoning, coach other engineers, and raise the operational capability of the whole team. If you enjoy solving intriguing system challenges, are innovative at heart, and thrive on making a measurable impact across teams, this role might be a great fit for you.

How will I use AI at Roku?

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 value curious, adaptable builders, who can show how they've used AI, agents, or automation to move faster, improve quality, and scale their impact. Strong candidates know how to frame problems, guide AI-assisted work, check the output, and learn quickly. Above all, they bring curiosity, adaptability, and sound judgment.

What are the responsibilities of the role?

Ownership & Incident Leadership

• Take responsibility for service outcomes end to end, including reliability, security, cost, operability, and supportability
• Lead major incidents with composure when information is incomplete, separating mitigation from root-cause investigation and communicating impact, status, risks, and next steps without speculation
• Facilitate comprehensive, blameless post-incident reviews that identify root causes and contributing factors, and follow corrective actions through to completion
• Track incident trends to surface systemic issues and prioritize reliability improvements
• Implement chaos engineering, game days, and disaster recovery exercises to validate resilience and build confidence in recovery procedures

SRE Process & Principles Implementation

• Establish and evolve SRE principles, frameworks, and methodologies across the organization, including Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets
• Manage Error Budgets as a data-driven mechanism for balancing feature velocity against reliability, and facilitate risk-tolerance conversations between engineering and product teams
• Use SLOs, error budgets, incident data, and operational metrics to guide where the team invests

Reliability Engineering & Infrastructure

• Reduce toil by identifying repetitive operational work and eliminating it through infrastructure-as-code, automation frameworks, and intelligent tooling, aiming to keep toil below 50% of team time
• Prefer sustainable corrective action over repeated manual intervention
• Implement capacity planning that ensures adequate headroom to meet SLOs during peak traffic, load spikes, and degraded states, including predictive models and automated scaling

Observability, Monitoring & Reporting

• Build observability systems that provide deep visibility into service health, performance, and user experience using the Four Golden Signals and USE/RED methodologies
• Create SRE dashboards and reporting that give real-time visibility into SLO compliance, error budget consumption, and reliability metrics, including executive-level reporting on trends and incident impact
• Establish actionable, symptom-based alerting aligned with SLOs, tuning thresholds to reduce noise while ensuring critical issues trigger appropriate responses
• Treat an alert without ownership or a usable runbook as an incomplete control

Collaboration, Influence & Leadership

• Partner with development teams to design reliability in from the start, conducting design reviews focused on failure modes, scalability, observability, and operational concerns
• Build alignment across product, application, security, compliance, and infrastructure teams, managing disagreements with evidence, impact, and trade-offs
• Gain support through credibility, relationships, and sound reasoning rather than title or tenure, and lead cross-functional work where participants do not report to you
• Coach engineers by delegating meaningful ownership, giving specific and timely feedback, and creating opportunities for others to lead projects and incidents
• Manage project priorities using error budgets as a decision-making framework, ensuring reliability work is prioritized alongside feature development

Delivery & Execution Discipline

• Convert roadmap objectives into clear epics, stories, milestones, owners, and acceptance criteria, identifying dependencies and risks early
• Track outcomes rather than activity, and adjust scope transparently when incidents or unplanned work affect delivery
• Finish work completely, including testing, documentation, monitoring, runbooks, rollout, and operational handoff

Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through analysis of metrics, traces, and profiles, and optimize resources, configurations, and auto-scaling for SLO compliance
• Drive continuous improvement by analyzing SLO violations, incident trends, and toil metrics to champion the reliability roadmap and technical-debt reduction
• Maintain a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing through runbooks, operational guides, architecture documentation, and disaster recovery procedures
• Track and report on SRE metrics, including SLO compliance, error budget consumption, Mean Time To Detection (MTTD), Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR), toil percentage, and reliability improvement velocity

Security & Risk Awareness

• Incorporate least privilege, secure defaults, auditability, and compliance into designs, and express risk in terms stakeholders can understand
• Avoid normalizing manual changes, undocumented exceptions, or permanent emergency access

On-call & Reliability

• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation and be available to work with global teams during critical outages

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

• Preferably 14+ years of experience in DevOps/SRE roles, with demonstrated expertise implementing SRE principles, SLO/SLI frameworks, and error budget policies in production environments
• Deep experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic, including building custom dashboards, alerts, and SLO-based monitoring
• Strong background in incident management, including experience as an Incident Commander, conducting blameless postmortems, and turning incident learnings into systemic improvements
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and reliability engineering, including failure modes, fault tolerance patterns, circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting, and graceful degradation
• Experience with several of the following: Kubernetes, Docker, and service mesh technologies such as Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, Solo, and Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• Experience in cloud-focused software development, preferably in Go, Python, or other object-oriented languages
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation
• Experience with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) automation, including GitLab pipelines and related tooling
• Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Proven track record of delivering scalable, high-performance infrastructure solutions in fast-paced, dynamic environments
• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and to work effectively across cross-functional teams
• Demonstrated influence without authority—improving outcomes across multiple teams and establishing standards that continued without your direct involvement
• Intellectual humility and curiosity, including comfort saying "I don't know, but here's how I'd find out," and changing position when presented with better evidence
• Self-driven and detail-oriented, with the ability to understand complex distributed systems and identify reliability risks proactively
• Certifications in relevant technologies, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), are preferred
• BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent

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