I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Roku (Saratoga, CA) in Sept 2011
Interview
I was approached by an external headhunter, who knew the VP of HR over there. Eventually had a 1-1 with the internal recruiter, went pretty well. Then I had an initial phone screen with a SW Director there. He was very technically oriented; we talked about how I'd go about troubleshooting a wonky wifi connection. He seemed very impressed.
Had the F2F interview. Things did not go so well. They asked me questions about TCP, how to bring up Linux in a new embedded system, pthreads, etc. I was flailing so badly, I could hear the sighs of exasperation from the Director that phone screened me, and the SWE attack weenie they sent my way.
The guy finally came out and told me I wasn't what they hoped for (a bit smugly I found). I concurred, and was sent about my merry way. However, they did alienate me to the point I returned the Roku I bought from them to try out. It's interesting, but nothing I haven't seen before (just in a smaller package). To me, they're just a one-trick pony within a low-margin consumer market.
So if you want to go, go cause you'd like to work on their tech (which seems interesting), but bring your A-game. Anything less, and you're mud to them.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
describe the flow-control that happens in a TCP connection
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Roku in Apr 2026
Interview
Talk with Recruiter, tech talk and Hackerrank with Engineer. Engineer interviewer offered little feedback during an implementation discussion. I justified my selection as being best for a time-constrained interview and he agreed. The interviewer was playing around in my code editor while I was typing, causing distractions and additional errors in my work. Finally, the interviewer was extremely dissatisfied that I did not use the other option that I had discussed, and that I did not select Python when I was told to solve in any language.
Recruiter called me and asked some general questions related to work experience, tech stacks etc. Later they asked about renumeration drawn from the current org: to which I responded saying 'need to check with HR regarding any NDA if they have pertaining to salary disclosure'. I also felt current renumeration being irrelavent question for next role and asked what's the comp. band that this role is entitled to. To which recruiter told without current comp. info, they won't be able to proceed further and rejected on spot.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Familarity with tech stack, work experience and salary.
I had recruiters from Roku reach out the whole year. I finally agreed to do a call. I had an initial call with a recruiter where we just talked about my past experience and what I’m looking for. Then I was scheduled for the next round with the hiring manager and was given zero context on what to expect despite asking. You should know that there be will coding with OOP on your first call with the HM despite no one saying anything about it. The whole thing was silly and pointless.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The hiring manager asked me to do an OOP solution for a warehouse inventory system, where you need to track the type and amount of a product and find the nearest warehouse with products the customer is looking for. Despite this being an OOP and you being able to implement it in TypeScript or any language, and despite the HM not mentioning, your solution needs to handle concurrency and have locking. Then you’ll be asked what you’d do differently in a production environment. You’ll need to state the obvious like writing tests, using a DB, distributed locking etc. The way they asked the question was very silly and assessed nothing.
