Senior ML Engineer, Cloud TV

About the team

Roku pioneered streaming to the TV and continues to innovate and lead the industry. As we strive to influence the future of television globally, including TV advertising, our continued success on this front requires us to lead with best-in-class Content Management System. With Roku providing millions of movies, episodes, news, and channels, our Content Management System plays a vital role in managing content ingestion, selection, enrichment, quality control and curation. We are seeking machine learning engineers capable of building intelligent, scalable systems and models that can automate media quality control, analyze vast volumes of content, and ensure video, audio, and closed captions meet our high standards before reaching millions of users.

About the role

Roku pioneered TV streaming and continues to shape the future of streaming through innovation. 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, so we deliver high quality streaming TV experience at a global scale. 

You will be part of the Roku Content Management System and Tools Engineering team, playing a key role in developing the next generation platform for Media Quality Control. This role involves developing an intelligent Content Quality Control platform which will power delightful experiences across all Roku TV touchpoints. This entails building sophisticated ML models to power our quality control workflows, ensuring quality and accuracy of key media attributes, including video, audio, and closed captions, for content featured on the Roku platform. As our content catalog continues to grow, the platform needs to be built for scalability, ensuring that our media consistently meets the highest standards of quality before reaching our audience. These systems are vital for powering critical functions like Search and Recommendation on the Roku Platform. Your work will have a direct impact on millions of Roku users globally by ensuring high-quality media reaches the audience. Throughout, you'll collaborate with key stakeholders across various Roku engineering teams and take the lead in designing our content management system.

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. This is an excellent role for a senior professional who enjoys a high level of visibility, thrives on having a critical business impact, able to make critical decisions and is excited to work on a core content pipeline component which is crucial for many streaming components at Roku.

What you’ll be doing

• Design and develop machine learning models and computer vision algorithms to automate the quality control process for video and audio, ensuring media quality by analyzing attributes such as frame rate consistency, color accuracy, noise detection, and loudness normalization across an expanding content catalog
• Create and optimize tools for evaluating closed captioning accuracy, synchronization, and quality
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product, engineering, and content operations, to align technical solutions with business needs
• Continuously improve the performance, efficiency, and scalability of QC models and algorithms, ensuring the system can handle an increasing volume of content
• Participate in architecture discussions, influence product roadmap, and take ownership and responsibility over new projects
• Manage individual project priorities, deadlines and deliverables with limited supervision

We’re excited if you have

• Strong problem solving and analytical abilities
• 5+ years of hands-on experience (or equivalent with PhD) in machine learning, AI, and computer vision, with a focus on media quality control or similar applications.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, C++, or Java.
• Strong experience with machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Scikit-learn.
• Expertise in computer vision libraries such as OpenCV, and experience with deep learning models for video and image analysis.
• Familiarity with FFmpeg for video and audio processing tasks, such as format conversion, frame extraction, and video compression.
• Experience with cloud platforms: AWS (preferred), GCP, or Azure.
• Strong understanding of data processing and pipeline development, with an emphasis on scalability.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, AI/ML, or related fields. A Ph.D. is a plus.

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