Senior Software Engineer, Video Encoding

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Roku

San Jose, California

Hybrid

Posted March 31, 2026

Job Description

Teamwork makes the stream work.

Roku is changing how the world watches TV

Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and we've set our sights on powering every television in the world. Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Our mission is to be the TV streaming platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem. We connect consumers to the content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers unique capabilities to engage consumers.

From your first day at Roku, you'll make a valuable - and valued - contribution. We're a fast-growing public company where no one is a bystander. We offer you the opportunity to delight millions of TV streamers around the world while gaining meaningful experience across a variety of disciplines.

About the team

You will be part of the Roku Video Platform Engineering team and responsible for building the next-generation video services for the Roku Cloud TV Platform. Roku pioneered TV streaming and continues to innovate and lead the industry. The Roku Channel has us well-positioned to help shape the future of streaming. Continued success relies on investing in the Roku Cloud TV Platform to deliver a high-quality streaming TV experience on a global scale.

About the role

As a Video Encoding Engineer, you will build, optimize, and maintain high-performance video processing workflows. You will own our end-to-end encoding toolchain—from experimentation and profile tuning to automated packaging workflows—ensuring our content is delivered with maximum quality, reliability, and efficiency.

You will work closely with the team on key video services projects around video ingestion, encoding, VoD/live-linear, Server-Side Ads Insertion, and Video QoS, with the goal of delivering a best-in-class streaming TV experience across all Roku devices. The projects that you will work on will impact millions of Roku users around the world. Throughout, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with key product engineering stakeholders across Roku engineering teams and to lead the design of our video services platform.

The ideal candidate will have endless curiosity and can pair a global mindset with locally relevant execution. You should be a gritty problem solver and self-starter who can drive programs with the product and commercial teams within Roku and across external strategic partner organizations. The successful candidate will display a balance of hard and soft skills, including the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs.

For California Only - The estimated annual salary for this position is between $285,000 - $345,000 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

Design, build, optimize, and maintain FFmpeg-based encoding pipelines for both VOD and Live workflows, operating at scale in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP
Develop, refine, and validate encoding presets for modern codecs, including H.264, HEVC, and AV1, ensuring optimal quality-to-bitrate performance
Implement advanced encoding strategies such as multi-pass workflows, CRF tuning, per-title optimizations, and quality-targeted encoding
Benchmark and evaluate video quality using VMAF and other objective metrics to drive continuous improvements in efficiency and viewing experience
Build and maintain adaptive streaming packaging workflows, including HLS, DASH, and CMAF, ensuring broad device compatibility and reliable playback
Profile and optimize system performance by identifying and eliminating bottlenecks across compute, storage, and I/O layers
Write, review, and improve code, assessing architectural tradeoffs to deliver secure, high-performance, and highly co