Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Ad Server Platform

Netflix•Los Angeles, CA

About The Position

At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next. We launched a new ad-supported tier in November 2022 and are building an in-house world-class ad tech ecosystem to offer our members more choices in consuming their content. Our new tier allows us to attract new members at a lower price point while also creating a compelling path for advertisers to reach deeply engaged audiences. Our Team The Ad Server Platform team sits within the Ad Serving & Decisioning org at Netflix Ads. We build and maintain the robust, scalable, and efficient ad serving infrastructure that forms the backbone of Netflix’s advertising ecosystem. Our mission is to ensure seamless and reliable delivery of ads across all platforms, devices, and viewing contexts. Our work spans the core services and frameworks that the broader Ads Platform depends on: supply-agnostic controls, policies, frequency caps, applying floor prices, ad podding rules, competitive separation, rule-based targeting, event processing, and the logging frameworks. We are looking for a distributed systems engineer with a platform mindset to build and scale infrastructure that multiple teams across the ads ecosystem depend on daily.

Requirements

7+ years building distributed systems and backend services at scale
Built or operated ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, or real-time bidding infrastructure
Strong platform engineering mindset: APIs, contracts, backward compatibility, multi-team consumers
Deep understanding of latency engineering: profiling, cache hierarchies, connection pooling, async I/O
Experience designing highly available, fault-tolerant systems with strong understanding of concurrency, parallel processing, and microservices architecture
Experience with event-driven architectures: Kafka, Flink, or similar stream processing
Proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or similar JVM languages with a history of writing production-quality, well-tested code
Understanding of ad serving concepts: targeting, frequency capping, publisher controls, programmatic protocols
Ability to operate in an environment that is a mix of big-tech scale and startup speed

Nice To Haves

Experience with CTV constraints: server-side ad insertion, live event ad serving at scale (NFL-sized audiences)
Multi-region deployment experience: active-active architectures, failover, and disaster recovery
Chaos engineering or SRE practices: error budgets, game days, fault injection
Built or improved logging and telemetry frameworks for high-throughput request pipelines

Responsibilities

Build and operate the ad serving runtime: request orchestration, targeting evaluation, policy enforcement, and ad selection under strict latency SLAs
Work closely with the programmatic team on infrastructure related to bid request/response handling, QPS management, and load shedding
Build and evolve the rule engine framework: a unified execution framework for blocking policies, frequency caps, supply floors, ad podding rules, competitive separation, and ad load management
Maintain and enhance APIs consuming upstream business objects, transforming them, and propagating updates to the ad server
Improve and evolve the frequency management service
Design logs, APIs and data contracts consumed by downstream teams
Drive platform reliability: SLO-driven development, graceful degradation, circuit breakers, capacity planning, and incident response
Instrument comprehensive logging, tracing, and telemetry across the ad request lifecycle
Own the full software development lifecycle for your systems: design, implementation, deployment, operations, and deprecation