I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Roku (Saratoga, CA) in May 2014
Interview
Contacted by the recruiter. I was not ready to take the interview during that time. Recruiter was kind enough to wait almost 2 to 3 months and then contacted again with the same opportunity. I was ready to take the interview. So first scheduled telephonic round. It was 45 mins long interview. Standard questions on previous experience, toughest bug that i worked, questions on threads, deadlocks etc. After that onsite interview was scheduled. I had prepared for it and practiced writing programs on board. I went to the the office. Total 3 persons interviewed me and each took 45 mins long. They started with their introduction then started asking me to write programs on board. All three of them asked different programs. Those are not academic type. More or less related to what they are working currently. For e.g. write a simple character FIFO implementation, function to convert ascii to int, a problem related to insertion sort, program to mirror the image, semaphores, locks etc. I wrote most of these programs and also tested to ensure the correctness. I guess only while implementing FIFO, i couldn't able to come up with correct IsFIFOFull() logic, otherwise rest all did OK. After all interviews they gave me *** ROKU 3 *** box for giving interview to them. That was very sweet and totally unexpected.
After going home I was sure i get the offer as my background is exactly matching to the job requirements, i'm working on competitor company and I did interview pretty good. But to my surprise next day I got email saying they are looking for better match to the requirements of this job. That means no-offer. This is not my first interview. I had given interviews to more than 20 companies and got 5 offers from different companies like ROKU. However i never did perform as good as in ROKU interview, but still no-offer !!!. God only knows why they didn't select me. Anyway i got free ROKU 3, which is a consolation prize in this process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write program to Mirror the image from half where each pixel is one bit. Char FIFO implementation.
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.
