Roku plans expansion into Austin

Roku, the company known for its streaming media players, has opened an office in Austin and is hiring hardware and software engineers to grow the company's engineering team.

The company, headquartered in Saratoga, Calif., is operating out of a temporary space while its permanent office in the Westech 360 building, located at 8911 N. Capital of Texas Hwy., is being built out, said Tricia Mifsud, Roku's senior director of corporate communication.

"We've wanted to expand our engineering team, and Austin is the perfect place for that," she said.

The office is led by Scott de Haas, vice president of hardware engineering. Roku is hiring hardware and software engineers for the office, which will have fewer than 50 employees, Mifsud said. Job openings are posted at www.roku.com/about/employment.

"This fall, we will launch Roku TV, which we are working with global TV manufacturers to build and sell," she said. "The engineering team in Austin will be key to this launch."

Roku, meaning "six" in Japanese, was founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood, who invented the DVR. It is his sixth company. The company launched the first device to stream Netflix over the Internet to the TV in 2008, and the media players now offer customers more than 1,200 channels.