Distributed Systems Engineer (L5) - Data Platform

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time.

The data platform teams at Netflix enable us to leverage data to bring joy to our members in many different ways. We provide centralized data platforms and tools for various business functions at Netflix, so they can utilize our data to make critical data-driven decisions. We do all the heavy lifting to make it easy for our business partners to work with data efficiently, securely, and responsibly. We aspire to lead the industry standard in building a world-class data infrastructure, as Netflix leads the way to be the most popular and pervasive destination for global internet entertainment.
We are looking for Distributed Systems Engineers to help evolve and innovate our infrastructure. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team to bring new perspectives as we solve the next set of challenges. In addition, we are open to remote candidates. We value what you can do, from anywhere in the U.S.
Spotlight on Data Platform Teams:

Data Security and Infrastructure

The Data Security and Infrastructure (DSI) team acts as a platform for our own data platforms, providing foundational infrastructure and tooling that empower Netflix to innovate rapidly in delivering cutting-edge data and analytics systems. Instead of building custom scaffolding for every new system, we focus on creating scalable, high-leverage infrastructure tailored to the demands of running data systems at Netflix's scale.

Our work spans infrastructure, security, deployment systems, and more, ensuring the reliability, security, and performance of our platform. A unique aspect of our team is our diverse tech stack, with many of our tools and systems developed in Go, Python and Java. If you thrive on solving complex problems, enjoy working with multiple programming languages, and want to make an impact at scale, this team could be a perfect fit for you!

Data Developer Experience

The Data Developer Experience (DDX) team at Netflix is dedicated to enhancing the experience of data practitioners—including Data Engineers, Analytics Engineers, ML Engineers, and Data Scientists. As we evolve toward the next generation of our data platform, the DDX team is focused on boosting productivity by developing cutting-edge data tools and infrastructure that eliminate the friction and toil of building, maintaining, and leveraging data products. If you're passionate about shaping the future of developer experience, making it faster and easier for Netflix data practitioners to deliver outstanding data products, come join our team!

Big Data Compute Spark  

The BDCS team is responsible for providing the cloud-native platform for distributed data processing at Netflix. This team is central to batch data processing in Data Platform. It provides support for Spark to ETL data into the Exabytes-scale data warehouse and support large-scale analytics on the data to provide insight to all the Netflix functions, such as A/B testing, Recommendations, Machine Learning, to name a few, and enable new business initiatives such as ads and live. 

We are looking for exceptional talent with experience in Spark, Presto / Trino, Druid, Iceberg and distributed database systems in general. Roles in this team involve solving super interesting and challenging problems of working with data at scale, building features and performance enhancements and working closely with open source communities to shape the projects and make contributions.

Data Movement Platform - Realtime Data Engines

Offers low level building blocks for the transport and processing of realtime data. For data transport we offer Kafka; for data processing we offer Flink and Mantis. Responsibilities include development of the control plane, compute resource management, reliability and availability of the data. Realtime data is critical across many business units of Netflix including Streaming, Gaming, Finance and Machine Learning platforms. This team also owns the Schema Registry to enable schema driven development for all real-time applications across Netflix.

Data Discovery and Governance
Data Discovery and Governance are strategic bets at Netflix that underpin our ability to leverage data as a valuable asset. The Netflix data discovery and governance team owns the foundational building blocks necessary for ensuring all our data is used effectively, efficiently, securely, and in compliance with regulations. Specifically, this allows Netflix to organize its data better, take informed actions with increased precision in security, privacy, and efficiency, improve our risk management capabilities, increase confidence in the quality of the data, and enable the discovery & auditing of high-value datasets.  

While Netflix has built a strong data platform foundation, we are still in the very early stages of setting up a scalable and extensible data discovery platform to help the company derive higher-level insights and values of data across new businesses like Games, Live, Ads, on top of our streaming service. 

Specifically, this team owns the Netflix-wide data catalog to capture and infer business metadata across all datasets at Netflix, distributed search and lineage infrastructure to effectively discover data and track lineage across different systems; and an extensible policy engine framework that allows our stakeholders to customize data policy rules for all datasets.

This would be your dream job if you enjoy:

• Solving real business needs at a large scale by applying your software engineering and analytical problem-solving skills.

• Architecting and building a robust, scalable, and highly available distributed infrastructure.

• Leading cross-functional initiatives and collaborating with engineers, product managers, and TPM across teams.

• Sharing our experiences with the open source communities and contributing to Netflix OSS.

About you:

• 7+ years experience in crafting complex, scalable distributed data infrastructure

• Proficiency in Java, C++, Golang, or Python with a solid understanding of multi-threading and memory management

• Proven track record of developing and maintaining high-impact systems

• Experience building and operating scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems

• You have a BS in Computer Science or a related field

A few more things about us:
As a team, we come from many different countries and our fields of education range from the humanities to engineering to computer science. Our team includes product managers, program managers, designers, full-stack developers, distributed systems engineers, and data scientists. Folks have the opportunity to wear different hats, should they choose to. We strongly believe this diversity has helped us build an inclusive and empathetic environment, and we look forward to adding your perspective to the mix!

Our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $170,000 - $720,000.
Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs. Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off.
Netflix has a unique culture and environment. Learn more here.

Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.