Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Personalized Recommendations

Help millions of people find their next favorite TV show

Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the US. 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 worldwide while gaining meaningful experience across various disciplines.

About the role

Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. While we are well-positioned to help shape the future of television – including TV advertising – around the world, continued success relies on its investment in our machine learning/ML recommendation engine.

Roku offers millions of options to our users: movies, episodes, news, and channels from all around the world. The ML Recommendations engine is key to user happiness by recommending them the most personalized channel or content they would love to watch. Solving this customer problem is why we're actively looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Search & Recommendations to drive further innovation in the channel and content recommendations.

The person in this role will leverage their technical skills, business intuition, and analytical thinking build best of class machine learning products. Hence, communication and presentation skills are important. The role requires both high technical aptitude and problem-solving abilities, motivation, and exceptional attention to detail. We're always in "build mode" because we're a company of data-focused builders, especially on the data-driven team. Every day, you'll look at what exists and find ways to make it better.

What you’ll be doing

• Understand the key business metrics and KPI's and develop the new one based on how business is evolving.
• Analyze user engagement and other key metrics to identify the trends
• Research and develop - tree, sequence, or neural networks based - state of the art machine learning models. Do the offline analysis to compare multiple models.
• Run online AB tests and analyze them against the critical KPI's from #1
• Develop the machine learning infrastructure to scale newer models on production and make them more reliable.
• Help develop multitask learning and multi objective model to balance different business KPI’s
• Help in recruiting new engineers.

We’re excited if you have

• 5+ years of experience applying Machine Learning to concrete problems at large-scale with an MS or a PhD with 3 years of experience
• Strong CS fundamentals. Should be able to write an algorithm with ease
• Good understanding of data science and machine learning fundamentals like regression, classification, tree-based approach, neural networks, and sequence-based models
• Proven familiarity with NLP approaches like W2V or Bert, which includes identifying the right KPIs and objective functions
• We’d love to see that you’ve worked with big data systems (Spark, EMR, S3, AirFlow) and can program (Java, Scala, or Python)
• Experience building in-production recommendation systems
• Good understanding of system architecture. Have experience in big data technologies – streaming architecture, data pipelines, etc.
• MS in Computer Science, Statistics, or related field, but a Ph.D. in CS or related fields is preferred

The Roku 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.

If you are results oriented, and are excited by the idea that Roku's success will depend on your ability to deliver cutting edge ML products, then Roku Recommendation team would love to talk to you!!

Hear from one of our machine learning leaders

Or hear directly from dozens of our Roku staff around the world at http://bit.ly/WeAreRokuVideos.