About the Team
The Advanced Development team at Roku pushes beyond today’s product lines to invent the next generation of intelligent and generative media systems. We explore ideas that sit years ahead of production, developing foundational technologies that will redefine how content is understood, created, and personalised across millions of Roku devices.
This is a rare environment — a PhD-level, cross-disciplinary group combining machine learning research, software engineering, and DevOps. Everyone here is an expert, but not narrowly focused. The team blends deep technical mastery with broad creative vision — people who challenge convention, embrace ambiguity, and build what’s never been built before. It’s a collaborative, low-ego, ownership-driven culture built on trust and curiosity.
We’re seeking an Applied Scientist with a strong foundation in mathematics, machine learning, and computer science, combined with experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, and computer vision — someone who thrives where research meets production.
About the Role
As a Senior Applied Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll help design, build, and deploy the systems that make media smarter. You’ll work across the full model and software lifecycle, from prototype to production, developing scalable ML pipelines and cloud architectures that power generative AI, intelligent media understanding, content analysis, and advertising intelligence.
You’ll operate at the intersection of machine learning, infrastructure, and software engineering, taking ownership from data collection through deployment — and seeing your work directly influence how audiences experience Roku’s content and advertising ecosystem.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Deploying scalable, fault-tolerant computer vision, media understanding, and generative AI systems to production
- Overseeing the full model development cycle: ideation, prototyping, implementation, deployment, testing, and operations
- Designing uncertainty metrics and communicating results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Gathering and compiling datasets, defining annotation ontologies, auditing annotation operations, and ensuring data quality
- Staying up to date with industry and academic trends in computer vision, machine learning, and generative models for media and advertising
- Working closely with product and other engineering teams to implement new content and advertising experiences through cloud services
- Integrating services from other teams around the company, while also providing reusable ML services to others
- Evaluating and providing feedback on new platform technologies provided by internal teams
- Working with QA teams to address bugs and contribute to automation and quality assurance
We’re Excited If You Have
- A Master’s degree (PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or a related field
- Strong background developing applied machine learning systems using PyTorch or TensorFlow
- Expertise in image processing, computer vision, or natural language processing
- Experience using AWS, GCP, or Azure for storing data, training, and serving models
- Proven ability to evaluate models and communicate insights effectively
- Experience building APIs with frameworks such as GraphQL or REST
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow, Argo, AWS Step Functions, or Metaflow
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation, CI/CD automation, and Python build or packaging tools