AI Roku Developer

Job Title: AI Roku Developer

Location: London 

Company: BritBox International

Reporting to: SVP of Technology and Content Delivery

Contract Type: Day rate Contractor, 3-month

About Us

BBC Studios’ Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) business brings premium content directly to North American audiences through two distinctive streaming brands: BritBox and BBC Select.

BritBox , the ultimate streaming destination for British TV. We offer an unparalleled collection of thoughtfully curated entertainment—cleverly crafted and full of the charm, wit, and heart that define British storytelling.

Born from the BBC, our mission is to bring authentic British stories to our audiences. Launched in 2017, we are a small but mighty streamer that punches above our weight—available on every major platform and even featured among the bright lights of Times Square—and we’re just getting started.

BBC Select is a documentary streaming service that has been successfully operating since February 2021. It has established itself as the third-largest documentary streaming service in the US. With plans to expand through original commissions, territorial premieres, and new distribution platforms, BBC Select continues to serve a highly engaged audience that values educational, high-quality content. The integration of BBC Select into the DTC organisation presents a strong opportunity to leverage shared capabilities, insights, and expertise to accelerate growth and enhance overall customer experience.

If you’re passionate about entertainment, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and want to play a meaningful role in our growth journey, this is your opportunity to be part of a dynamic Direct-to-Consumer business within BBC Studios, bringing the very best of British TV to fans everywhere.

Job Purpose:

We are seeking a Contract Senior Roku Engineer specialising in agentic development to deliver production-ready, certification-ready Roku applications through an AI-first delivery model.

The contractor will design and operate a development workflow in which autonomous coding agents perform the majority of planning, implementation, testing, debugging, code review, and documentation, with the contractor acting as solution architect, agent orchestrator, technical reviewer, validator, and final approver.

This is not a conventional Roku development role where AI is limited to autocomplete, code suggestions, or personal productivity. AI agents are the primary implementation mechanism. The proportion of implementation work completed by agents will be instrumented, reported, and agreed as a measurable target per milestone, recognising that BrightScript and SceneGraph are a specialised platform and that agent effectiveness must be built deliberately through context engineering, tooling, and feedback loops rather than assumed.

The contractor retains full accountability for the quality, security, performance, maintainability, and certification readiness of all delivered work, regardless of whether it was authored by an agent or by hand. Device-level validation and release approval are human-owned gates and cannot be delegated to agents.

Anthropic Claude Code is strongly preferred as the primary agentic toolchain. Experience with OpenAI Codex is desirable. All agentic tooling must be used through BritBox-approved enterprise accounts and in accordance with BritBox AI governance requirements.

Responsibilities:

Workflow design and orchestration

• Design, build, and operate an agent-led development workflow for Roku applications, selecting single-agent or multi-agent architectures based on measurable improvements in delivery, quality, or reliability rather than complexity for its own sake.

• Define agent roles, instructions, tool access, permissions, context-management strategies, retry limits, quality gates, escalation paths, and approval boundaries.

• Engineer the context, documentation, and tooling required to make agents effective on the Roku platform, including structured use of Roku developer documentation, project conventions, and platform constraints.

Governance and approval boundaries

• Implement and enforce human approval gates for high-risk, irreversible, security-sensitive, or release-related actions.

• Operate all agentic tooling within BritBox-approved accounts and data-handling boundaries, ensuring source code, content feeds, credentials, and commercially sensitive material are handled in accordance with BritBox confidentiality and AI usage policies.

• Maintain traceable, auditable evidence of agent activity, code attribution, test results, approval decisions, and significant manual interventions.

• Monitor and report agentic tooling usage and inference costs against agreed budgets.

Review and validation

• Review and approve all AI-generated BrightScript, SceneGraph XML, tests, configurations, and technical documentation before merge.

• Identify and resolve hallucinated APIs, incomplete implementations, architectural problems, security risks, licence and IP provenance issues, regressions, and performance defects in agent output.

• Personally validate applications on physical Roku devices and through the Roku development and certification toolchain, including deep linking, billing, and playback flows required for certification.

Quality engineering and automation

• Establish automated unit testing, linting, static analysis, regression testing, and release-readiness checks that agents can execute and act upon, using Roku-appropriate frameworks and device automation where available.

• Enable agents to analyse requirements, create implementation plans, manage dependencies, produce code, run tests, review results, and correct failures within defined boundaries.

• Intervene directly and implement by hand when agents cannot safely or reliably complete a task, recording the intervention and feeding it back into workflow improvements.

Continuous improvement and reporting

• Improve agent instructions, tooling, context, and workflows based on observed failures, intervention rates, and evaluation results.

• Report agreed metrics per milestone, including the proportion of implementation completed by agents, intervention rate, defect escape rate, and test coverage.

Collaboration and delivery

• Collaborate with product, design, backend, video, and quality assurance stakeholders.

• Deliver reliable, maintainable, performant, and certification-ready Roku applications against milestones, acceptance criteria, and success metrics agreed in the Statement of Work.
  

Knowledge and Experience

• Strong professional experience developing and shipping production Roku applications.

• Advanced knowledge of BrightScript and Roku SceneGraph.

• Strong understanding of Roku SDKs, platform APIs, application lifecycle, navigation, focus management, and remote-control interactions.

• Experience with video playback, streaming workflows, application packaging, device deployment, debugging, profiling, and Roku certification.

• Demonstrable experience delivering production software through autonomous or semi-autonomous coding agents, with agents completing meaningful planning, implementation, testing, and correction work.

• Demonstrable experience making coding agents effective on niche or low-resource languages and platforms, for example through curated context packs, custom tooling, platform documentation pipelines, or device-in-the-loop feedback. This is a core requirement of the role, as agent performance on BrightScript cannot be assumed from mainstream-language experience.

• Experience designing single-agent and multi-agent workflows, with the ability to select the appropriate level of complexity for each task.

• Strong experience defining agent instructions, tool access, permissions, context-management strategies, quality gates, retry limits, and escalation processes.

• Ability to evaluate AI-generated code for technical correctness, maintainability, security, performance, licence compliance, and platform compliance, and to identify plausible but incorrect code, APIs, assumptions, and test results.

• Strong software architecture, debugging, automated testing, and code-review skills.

• Experience with Git-based development, CI/CD, static analysis, and structured release processes.

• Experience instrumenting and reporting code attribution, agent activity, and quality metrics in an auditable form.

• Strong hands-on experience with agentic coding tools. Claude Code experience is strongly preferred. Experience with OpenAI Codex is desirable.

• Experience with MCP servers, agent frameworks, custom tool integrations, observability, or automated AI evaluations is advantageous.

• Experience with Roku test automation, for example Rooibos unit testing or ECP-based device automation, is advantageous.

• Knowledge of Roku billing, authentication, analytics, advertising, deep linking, accessibility, DRM, captions, HLS, DASH, and content feeds is advantageous.

• Awareness of the cost profile of agent-led development and experience managing inference spend against budgets is advantageous.

• Ability to work independently as a contractor and deliver against milestones, acceptance criteria, and metrics agreed in the Statement of Work.

• Strong written communication and technical documentation skills.

• Willingness to provide evidence of agent-led software delivery through a portfolio example, redacted execution records, an open-source project, a live demonstration, or a paid practical assessment. Candidate evidence should demonstrate agents completing meaningful implementation work, validating their outputs, responding to failures, and operating within clearly defined human approval boundaries.
  

Our Values

Our BritBox Global Values not only represent our culture but also ensure that we have principles that shape everything we do. Defined by our employees, they are not just words on a page, but the foundation of how we work together, every day.

Our values have been cascaded into specific behaviours, which are embedded into all of our people processes, including hiring, onboarding, performance evaluation and feedback.

We are proud of our values and seek to hire people who resonate with them

This job spec is not exhaustive and may change from time to time in line with the evolving nature of a dynamic and growing business.