About the team

Subscriptions are a key growth area for Roku and are a significant growth path. The subscription platform is part of every step of the customer journey from product placement, purchase, renewals, and viewing experience of digital content on TV and smart home products in domestic and international markets. It also empowers our partners with real-time subscription information, ensuring customers have a smooth purchase and viewing experience. In this role, as part of the subscriptions platform team, you will envision, architect, build, and run a highly available, fault-tolerant, efficient, and performant platform that scales to billions of viewers.

About the role 

In this role, you will lead the architecture and implementation of a highly available, fault‑tolerant, and performant subscriptions platform that scales to billions of viewers across AWS/GCP, owning key initiatives end‑to‑end while coding roughly 80% of the time. You’ll evaluate and adopt new technologies, design shared architectural layers (queuing, event systems, shared memory), and collaborate across Product, Engineering, QA, and Ops to deliver resilient services spanning streaming, APIs, notifications, and batch workloads. As a hands‑on technical leader, you will set engineering excellence by example, drive CI/CD automation and platform reuse, influence roadmap through cross‑team architectural discussions, and consistently turn complex requirements into reliable, well‑documented systems.

For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $186,000 - $388,000 annually. Compensation packages are based on factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, certifications, and specific geographical location. This role is eligible for health insurance, equity awards, life insurance, disability benefits, parental leave, wellness benefits, and paid time off.

What you'll be doing

• Lead the evaluation and implementation of new technologies and designs. Evaluate emerging technologies and seek innovative solutions to address existing and new challenges
• Engage in architectural discussions across multiple teams, influence the roadmap, and take ownership of key projects and initiatives 
• Providing technical leadership and expertise to drive platform capabilities to ensure high availability and scalability
• Demonstrate engineering excellence practice by setting expectations and leading by hands-on examples
• Own building platform features, driving directly with product and other engineering teams
• Own design and implementation of shared architectural layers (e.g., queuing, event systems, shared memory clusters) and libraries that can be used across teams
• Review technical specification documents, provide feedback, and collaborate for best in class solution
• Be an evangelist for best practices across all functions – developers, QA, and infrastructure/ops
• Be an evangelist for platform innovation and reuse
• Be actively involved in code/design reviews and expected to code 80% of the time

We’re excited if you have 

• 10+ years of experience in architecting, implementing, and running large-scale services, specifically in subscriptions, purchase, and billing domains
• Experience building systems of various workloads - streaming, API, notifications, batch, etc. 
• Expertise in various subscription flows, including tax, payment, purchase, renewal, dunning, cancellation, repurchase, and invoicing. 
• Strong architectural design experience, great track record of building a highly available and scalable subscription platform
• Strong expertise with cloud solutions/systems across cloud with AWS or GCP is a must 
• Strong experience in designing and leading the implementation of highly complex transactional systems, collaborating with teams across the organization
• Strong passion for technology and adding value to the bottom line through technology
• Strong passion & expertise with automation, including building and adopting CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with multi-cloud solutions is a plus, and the ability to offer technical guidance to design, deploy, and scale applications across multiple cloud environments
• Experience integrating with various streaming and subscription platforms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung is a plus

#LI-DH2

About the team

About the Role:

We are seeking a talented and experienced SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Senior Software Engineer to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in SRE practices, cloud infrastructure management, and automation. If you have a consistent track record of architecting and building large-scale systems, enjoy solving intriguing system challenges at internet-scale, and if you are innovative at heart, and have a great balance of skills in learning, organizing, building, and enjoy making an impact, this role might be a great fit for you!

What you’ll be doing:

• Design & Infrastructure

  • Contribute to postmortem culture by facilitating comprehensive, blameless post-incident reviews that identify root causes, contributing factors, and actionable remediation items. Track incident trends to identify systemic issues and prioritize reliability improvements.

  • Implement chaos engineering practices to proactively identify failure modes, validate system resilience, and build confidence in recovery procedures. Conduct game days and disaster recovery exercises.

• SRE Process & Principles Implementation

  • Deploy and evolve SRE practices across the organization by establishing core SRE principles, frameworks, and methodologies. Define and implement service reliability practices, including Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets, to balance innovation velocity with system reliability.

  • Manage Error Budgets as a mechanism for making data-driven decisions about feature velocity vs. reliability. Track, report, and enforce error budget policies, facilitating conversations between engineering and product teams about risk tolerance and release decisions.

• Reliability Engineering & Infrastructure

  • Reduce toil through automation by identifying repetitive operational work and systematically eliminating it through infrastructure-as-code, automation frameworks, and intelligent tooling. Measure and track toil reduction efforts, aiming to keep toil below 50% of team time.

  • Implement capacity planning processes that ensure systems have adequate headroom to meet SLOs during peak traffic, unexpected load spikes, and degraded states. Develop predictive models and automated scaling mechanisms.

• Observability, Monitoring & Reporting

  • Build comprehensive observability systems that provide deep visibility into service health, performance, and user experience. Implement monitoring strategies based on the Four Golden Signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) and USE/RED methodologies.

  • Create SRE dashboards and reporting mechanisms that provide real-time visibility into SLO compliance, error budget consumption, and system reliability metrics. Develop executive-level reporting on reliability trends, incident impact, and improvement initiatives.

  • Establish alerting strategies that are actionable, symptom-based, and aligned with SLOs. Reduce alert fatigue by tuning thresholds and eliminating noise while ensuring critical issues trigger appropriate responses.

• Collaboration and Leadership

  • Partner with development teams to implement reliability from the design phase using SRE principles. Conduct design reviews focused on failure modes, scalability, observability, and operational concerns. Guide teams in building services that meet SLO requirements.

  • Collaborate through code reviews and design reviews, ensuring infrastructure-as-code, automation scripts, and reliability improvements follow best practices, are well-documented, and maintain high-quality standards.

  • Manage project priorities using error budgets as a decision-making framework. Leverage agile methodologies while ensuring reliability work gets appropriate prioritization alongside feature development.

• Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

  • Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through detailed analysis of metrics, traces, and profiles. Optimize system resources, tune configurations, and implement auto-scaling to ensure SLO compliance during varying load conditions.

  • Drive continuous improvement through SRE feedback loops by analyzing SLO violations, incident trends, and toil metrics to identify systemic improvements. Champion the reliability roadmap and advocate for technical debt reduction.

  • Maintain a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing by creating comprehensive runbooks, operational guides, system architecture documentation, and disaster recovery procedures. Ensure operational knowledge is distributed across the team.

  • Track and report on SRE metrics, including SLO compliance rates, error budget consumption, mean time to detection (MTTD), mean time to resolution (MTTR), toil percentage, and reliability improvement velocity.

• On-call & reliability

  • Participate in a 12x7 on-call rotation and be available to work with global teams in the event of critical outages

We’re excited if you have:

• Preferably 8+ years of experience in DevOps/SRE roles, with demonstrated expertise in 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, New Relic, or equivalent, including experience building custom dashboards, alerts, and SLO-based monitoring.

• Strong background in incident management, including experience as an Incident Commander, conducting blameless postmortems, and implementing systematic reliability improvements based on incident learnings.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems and reliability engineering, including failure modes, fault tolerance patterns, circuit breakers, bulkheads, rate limiting, and graceful degradation strategies.

• Experience with a number of the following: Kubernetes, Docker, Service Mesh such as Istio, Envoy, Linkerd, Solo & ECS

• Experience in cloud-focused software development, preferably in Go, Python, or other object-oriented programming languages

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation

• Experience with CI/CD automation, including GitLab pipelines and other related tools.

• Strong hands-on experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP or Azure

• Proven track record of implementing scalable, high-performance infrastructure solutions in fast-paced, dynamic environments

• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical project stakeholders, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment

• 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.

#LI-SK8