Technical Architect - Business Applications

About the role

Roku Advertising powers a multi-billion-dollar business and operates at the scale of one of the largest CTV ad platforms in the US. We're looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to drive the next evolution of how this business runs, partnering closely with advertising business stakeholders, product management, and engineering teams to transform our operations using machine learning and agentic AI systems.

You'll apply intelligence across the entire Roku advertising business lifecycle, including pre-sales, booking, campaign management, delivery, and revenue workflows, building agents that recommend, automate, and optimize decisions from end to end. Your work will directly influence how a multi-billion-dollar revenue base is planned, executed, and measured.

This is not a research-only role. You will own production-grade ML and agentic systems that create measurable business impact, set the technical direction for AI-native operations, and lead other engineers with technical direction.

For Massachusetts Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $250,000 - $450,000 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 

• Develop and oversee technical strategy for Roku’s platform that support diverse business applications.
• Drive the AI-native transformation of Roku's advertising business operations, identifying high-leverage opportunities and influencing roadmap, architecture, and system design across multiple teams.
• Start from the needs of internal engineers and business operators, bringing a creative and strategic approach to simplifying systems and introducing practical, high-impact solutions.
• Work closely with advertising business stakeholders to identify needs, surface high-impact opportunities, and translate operational pain points into ML and agentic AI solutions.
• Design and ship production ML and agentic systems end-to-end, including recommendation, personalization, ranking, forecasting, anomaly detection, and multi-agent or agent-to-agent workflows, embedded directly within product and operational systems where they drive decisions.
• Apply GenAI and LLMs to create measurable value, building and scaling Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails, with a focus on reliability and outcomes over hype.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into production solutions, partnering with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and business teams to ground ML and AI work in real operational impact.
• Build and operationalize evaluation loops covering precision and recall, calibration, drift detection, and human-in-the-loop systems, and define the dashboards and Service Level Objectives (SLO) that tie model performance to business outcomes.
• Provide technical leadership across the broader ML and AI surface area, raising the bar for engineering rigor, mentoring engineers, and shaping how the organization thinks about AI-native systems.

We're excited if you have 

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with a track record of technically leading and delivering large-scale assistant or autonomous systems
• Strong foundation in machine learning and statistical modeling, including clustering, classification, regression, decision trees, neural networks, SVMs, and anomaly detection, with deep understanding of supervised and unsupervised learning, feature engineering, model evaluation, bias-variance tradeoffs, and offline vs. online metrics.
• Proven experience building and scaling production ML and AI systems, including LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, retrieval-based systems, and multi-agent or agent-based system design.
• Hands-on experience designing, training, tuning, and deploying models for ranking, prediction, recommendation, forecasting, classification, or NLP use cases.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), microservices, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and DevOps
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including setting direction, influencing across teams, and elevating the work of other engineers.
• Experience in advertising, marketplaces, e-commerce, travel, or similar data-rich, decision-driven platforms is a strong plus.

#LI-RN1

About the role

Roku Advertising powers a multi-billion-dollar business and operates at the scale of one of the largest CTV advertising platforms in the US. We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to drive the next evolution of how Roku’s advertising business applications operate, partnering closely with advertising business stakeholders, product, architecture, and engineering teams to transform operational workflows using machine learning, GenAI, and agentic AI systems.

This role is focused on applying AI across Roku’s advertising business applications, including pre-sales, booking, campaign management, delivery, optimization, and revenue operations. You will build intelligent systems and agents that recommend, automate, orchestrate, and optimize decisions across complex operational workflows and interconnected business applications.

We are looking for someone who combines strong software engineering and architectural fundamentals with practical experience building and scaling AI-native systems in production environments. The ideal candidate has experience building large-scale enterprise business applications and operational systems in traditional software engineering environments and has more recently applied GenAI, LLMs, and agentic AI systems to modernize and automate complex workflows.

This is not a research-only role. You will own production-grade AI and agentic systems that create measurable business impact, influence architecture and technical direction for AI-native operations, and help shape how AI capabilities are embedded across Roku’s advertising business applications.

For Massachusetts Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $250,000- $450,000 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 

• Drive the AI-native transformation of Roku’s advertising business applications, identifying high-leverage opportunities and contributing to roadmap, architecture, and system design across multiple teams.
• Work closely with advertising business stakeholders to identify operational challenges, simplify complex workflows, and translate business pain points into scalable AI and agentic system solutions.
• Design and deliver production-grade AI systems end-to-end, including recommendation, ranking, forecasting, anomaly detection, workflow automation, and multi-agent or agent-to-agent orchestration embedded directly within operational platforms and business applications.
• Apply GenAI and LLM technologies where they create measurable value, including RAG pipelines, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks, memory-aware systems, and guardrails, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and operational outcomes over hype.
• Partner deeply with engineers, data scientists, product managers, architects, and business teams to translate ambiguous operational problems into practical production solutions that drive measurable business impact.
• Build evaluation and observability frameworks covering precision and recall, calibration, drift detection, human-in-the-loop systems, operational metrics, dashboards, and SLOs that connect AI system performance to business outcomes.
• Start from the needs of internal engineers and business operators, bringing a creative and strategic approach to simplifying systems and introducing pragmatic, high-impact solutions.
• Provide technical leadership within the broader AI and engineering ecosystem, influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and helping establish engineering best practices for AI-native application development.

We're excited if you have 

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling large enterprise business applications and operational platforms, with recent experience applying AI, GenAI, and agentic systems within production enterprise environments.
• Proven experience building and scaling production AI systems, including LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, retrieval systems, workflow orchestration, and multi-agent or agent-based architectures.
• Strong foundation in machine learning and statistical modeling techniques, including classification, regression, clustering, anomaly detection, ranking, forecasting, recommendation systems, and NLP use cases.
• Deep understanding of machine learning fundamentals, including feature engineering, model evaluation, bias-variance tradeoffs, offline vs. online metrics, and production monitoring.
• Strong software engineering, architecture, and system design skills, with experience building reliable, scalable, and maintainable enterprise business applications, workflow-driven systems, and operational platforms.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, including influencing architecture and technical direction across teams, mentoring engineers, and driving execution in ambiguous environments.
• Experience in advertising, marketplaces, e-commerce, travel, or similar operationally complex, data-rich platforms is a strong plus.

#LI-RN1