Distributed Systems Engineer (L4) - Data Platform

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with 283 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 that will 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:

Gen AI Platform

The mission of the Gen AI Platform team is to boost the productivity of the data science and engineering community at Netflix. This means enabling users to spend more time solving business problems and less time engineering lower-level systems. We are seeking a Software Engineer to help build a developer platform that will provide the building blocks for Netflix to efficiently create GenAI applications. The platform will enable our teams to leverage LLM models and internally fine-tuned models. It will provide tools to support the LLM development lifecycle, high-level abstraction APIs for RAG, and tools for prompt engineering, management, and LLM operations.

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 supports large-scale analytics on the data to provide insight into all the Netflix functions, such as A/B testing, Recommendations, and 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 related to working with data at scale, building features and performance enhancements, and working closely with open source communities to shape the projects and make contributions.

Online Data Stores

Online Data Stores organization offers managed datastores at scale to meet Netflix’s operational data requirements across all lines of business. These datastores include various domains Caching, Relational, Search, Key-Value, and Composite. Our focus is on developing and maintaining high-performance, reliable, and efficient datastores. Additionally, we enhance developer productivity by providing secure, intuitive, and opinionated access layers.

This team is passionate about building innovative, efficient, performant, and scalable offerings for our customers. Our team also engages with open-source communities, actively contributing to and responsibly stewarding the development and use of open-source software.
 

Data Movement Platform - Realtime Data Engines

Offers low-level building blocks for the transport and processing of real-time data. For data transport, we offer Kafka; for data processing, we offer Flink and Mantis. Responsibilities include developing the control plane, compute resource management, and data reliability and availability. Real-time 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 Movement Platform - Abstractions

Offers an abstracted self-service paved path product to enable varied user personas across Netflix to meet their Data Movement and Processing requirements; enables abstraction over complex real-time frameworks such as Kafka and Flink and batch frameworks such as Spark; offers a Schema driven processing experience; invests in operational automation, reliability and tools for predictable data quality.

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 of high-value datasets.  

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.

Analytics Infrastructure and Enablement

Offers a platform that enables data practitioners to develop and manage data models for broad analytical use and to produce analytic products with efficiency and ease. The ultimate goal of the team is to enable broader self-service of high fidelity analytics by developing robust APIs, user-friendly  interfaces, and semi-automated data management and governance systems. Our team offers abstractions on Netflix's expansive data warehouse, and other data platform components, to provide easy access to semantic data models and easier development of analytical reporting and visualizations.

This would be your dream job if you enjoy:

• Solving real business needs at 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:

• You have 2+ years of experience in building large-scale distributed systems features or applications.

• You are proficient in the design and development of RESTful web services.

• Experienced in building and operating scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems

• You are experienced in Java or other object-oriented programming languages.

• Multi-threading is a challenge that you are comfortable tackling.

• 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 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 is 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.