Senior Partner Engineer

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

The Partner Engineering team’s vision is to establish Roku as the preferred platform of choice for our partners (media companies) to distribute and monetize their content globally. The Partner Engineering team’s mission is to be the technical advocate and point of contact for the Partner’s Engineering organization within Roku to help them deliver the best content viewing experience globally for the Roku user community. On a day-to-day basis, we work with engineers from partners organization to help them develop, test, certify, and launch partners direct-to-consumer (DTC) apps in compliance with the Roku platform distribution agreement. We represent partners’ roadmap and technical needs by working cross-functionally with the assigned Partner Engagement Managers, product and engineering teams within Roku.

About the role

Roku's platform is live across the multiple European countries, and our European footprint is growing — through Roku TV licensing partners, through our own streaming hardware, and through the local broadcasters and streaming services that make the platform worth owning in each market.

You will be the senior engineer for our European partners: the person who makes their apps fast, stable and certifiable on Roku, who represents their technical constraints to our platform and OS teams, and who makes each new market launch a technical success rather than a scramble.

You will be the engineer for a portfolio of European partners — public service and commercial broadcasters, subscription streaming services and pay-TV operators — working with the Partner Engineering team in San Jose and with the Partner Engagement Manager in London who owns those partners’ relationships. You will debug crashes, memory and launch-time issues, diagnose partner-reported streaming problems, and give your partners hands-on support through Roku certification.

How you’ll work with the Partner Engagement Manager. The Partner Engagement Manager from Roku owns the partner relationship, the launch plan and timeline, partner priorities, and communication during incidents. You own the technical diagnosis, the integration work, and technical sign-off on certification and launch readiness, working engineer to engineer with the partner’s technical team. When something breaks, the Partner Engagement Manager coordinates the response and keeps the partner informed; you find the root cause and the path to a fix.

Level: Senior individual contributor, with no direct reports.

Reports to: Director, Partner Engineering, based in San Jose.

Location and work arrangement: London, UK, in the office Monday to Thursday, with flexible Fridays. Travel within Europe up to 40% of your time. Regular late-afternoon calls with San Jose, whose working day starts at 4pm UK time.

On-call: For major partner launches and live events, the Partner Engagement Manager is the on-call escalation point and brings this role in for technical diagnosis, which can mean occasional work outside normal hours.

Expected impact: European partners’ apps pass certification and launch without technical surprises. Additionally, you’ll own the stability, performance and engagement metrics for your partners' apps, and keep each at or better than its benchmark: Roku's certification thresholds and the best-performing apps on the platform.

Stability: crash rate, unexpected app closures and out-of-memory terminations

Performance: launch time, video start time, video start and playback failures, and rebuffering

Engagement: streaming hours per subscriber

App Certification and public release: time from technical onboarding to launch in each new market

Incidents: platform-caused incidents affecting your partners' apps, and time to resolve them

What you'll do

European market expansion

Sign off the technical readiness of each new market launch. The Partner Engagement Manager owns the launch plan and timeline; you work with Channel Publishing and Certification to get global and local broadcasters and streaming services onto the platform ahead of a market opening — scoping integrations, running technical onboarding, and clearing the issues that would otherwise surface on launch day. Then write down what “technically ready” meant for that market, so the next launch is faster and cheaper.

Represent regional technical requirements inside Roku engineering. European partners hit constraints that do not exist in North America: built-in broadcast TV tuners on Roku TVs, accessibility obligations, rules on how prominently European content is shown, privacy rules for viewing data, and regional differences in content protection and delivery. You will work out what each means technically, and turn it into concrete platform requirements, feature requests and firmware bugs — and follow them to resolution. You don’t need to be an expert in each regulation but should be capable to work cross-functionally with Roku legal, product, engineering to drive these requests to resolution,

Help European partners integrate Roku Pay, working with Roku technical teams: you advise partners on their integration, debug it, and test European purchase flows for multi-currency pricing, VAT and invoicing expectations, strong customer authentication (PSD2/SCA) at purchase and re-authentication, and local payment method coverage.

Resolve platform issues on Roku TV and operator devices in Europe. When a TV maker’s or operator’s hardware makes partner apps misbehave, you reproduce the problem, measure which devices and apps it affects, and work it to a fix with Roku engineering teams.

Core Partner Engineering

Diagnose and resolve partner app defects end to end — BrightScript/SceneGraph and TypeScript crashes, memory pressure, launch-time and playback-start regressions, general performance problems, and Roku Search integration issues. When the cause is in the partner’s app, you agree the fix with their engineers, who change their own code; you prototype or suggest the patch where it helps. When it’s in the Roku platform, you file it with a reproducible case and work the fix with the team that owns it.

Debug streaming and playback problems across DASH and HLS, from manifest and DRM issues to playback problems on physical hardware.

Drive adoption of AI-assisted app development to lower partners' total cost of building on Roku. Help partners' engineers use AI coding assistants with Roku's developer tools to build, debug and certify apps faster, feed what you learn back into those tools, and measure the savings in time to certify and engineering effort per release.

Get partner apps through Roku certification. When an app fails on launch time, memory, crash rate or playback, you find the root cause and agree the fix with the partner’s engineers, rather than relaying the result. Roku’s certification team runs the review; you give the technical sign-off that the app is ready.

Own the technical side of partner escalations from first report to resolution, finding the root cause and driving the fix with the firmware, media, platform and channel publishing teams, and keeping the Partner Engagement Manager and the partner’s engineers informed.

What success looks like in your first year

By 90 days: you’re the engineer for a portfolio of European partners, can debug and profile their apps on your own, and have taken at least one partner defect from first report to root cause.

By 6 months: European partners ask for you by name. You have carried a certification escalation to resolution and turned at least one European constraint into platform work that Roku engineering is delivering.

By 12 months: you have signed off the technical readiness of a new market launch or a major Roku TV partnership, your partners’ apps stay within Roku’s thresholds for launch time, memory and crash rate, and the market-readiness playbook you wrote is what the next engineer uses.

What we're looking for

Required

7+ years in software engineering, with meaningful time spent debugging and optimizing applications on constrained or embedded platforms — smart TV, set-top box, mobile or games console.

Proven AI-assisted coding experience: regular, hands-on use of AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, Copilot, Cursor, OpenCode) in real development work, with specific examples of AI tools used in production workflows.

Strong practical debugging skill: you are comfortable taking an ambiguous “the app is slow on this TV” report and working it down to a root cause with logs, traces and telemetry.

Working knowledge of adaptive streaming — DASH and/or HLS — and the failure modes around manifests, DRM and fMP4 playback.

Experience in a partner-, customer- or developer-facing engineering role, with the judgement to know what to share, when to escalate, and how to say no to an external stakeholder without damaging the relationship.

Comfort with data: SQL against large telemetry datasets, and a habit of quantifying impact before proposing a fix.

Proficiency in at least one of C/C++, Python or JavaScript/TypeScript, and willingness to become fluent in BrightScript.

Based in or able to work from our London office Monday to Thursday, with availability to travel within Europe up to 40% of the time.

Strongly preferred

Direct experience with European broadcast or streaming: working at or with a public service broadcaster, commercial broadcaster, European subscription streaming service, or pay-TV operator.

Familiarity with European platform and regulatory context — DVB and HbbTV broadcast standards, the European Accessibility Act, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), GDPR as it applies to viewing data, or strong customer authentication (PSD2/SCA) in payment flows.

Experience launching a product or platform into a new country or region, with exposure to the technical, regulatory and partner-onboarding work that involves.

Professional working proficiency in a second European language — German, French or Spanish are the most immediately useful.

Prior work on smart TV platforms, embedded Linux, or media pipelines.

#LI-ST1

What's Roku's approach to hybrid working?

Roku fosters an inclusive and collaborative environment where teams generally work in the office Monday through Thursday. Fridays are generally flexible for remote work, except for employees whose specific roles or assigned office location require five days' a week attendance.

What are some of the benefits?

Roku is committed to offering a diverse range of benefits as part of our compensation package to support our employees and their families. Our comprehensive benefits include global access to mental health and financial wellness support and resources. Local benefits include statutory and voluntary benefits which may include healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), life, accident, disability, commuter, and retirement options (401(k)/pension). Employees are supported in taking time off, in accordance with local leave policies and other personal needs to support their evolving work and life needs. It's important to note that not every benefit is available in all locations or for every role. For details specific to your location, please consult with your recruiter.

Accommodations

Roku welcomes applicants of all backgrounds and provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments in accordance with applicable law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any point in the hiring process, please direct your inquiries to [email protected].

What should I know about Roku's culture?

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We believe a fewer number of very talented folks can do more for less cost than a larger number of less talented teams. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's changing how the world watches TV.

We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn't real until it is built and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002.

To learn more about Roku, our global footprint, and how we've grown, visit https://www.weareroku.com/factsheet.

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