Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Ads Creative Infrastructure

Netflix•Los Gatos, CA

8d•$388,000 - $619,000

About The Position

In April 2022, Netflix introduced a new, more affordable, ad-supported tier, marking a significant milestone. The company is now focused on expanding consumer choices and providing advertisers with a premium TV brand experience. The challenge involves scaling ad tech to maximize its business impact. The Ads Platform Engineering teams build advertising systems and integrations that power ad delivery using Netflix's world-class content delivery ecosystem. They utilize a unique mix of client and server-side ad insertions, a state-of-the-art content delivery system, ad encoding recipes, and content understanding and metadata. Ads are delivered thoughtfully of the member's viewing experience and drive great outcomes for advertisers, while ensuring advertiser brand safety and appropriateness for members. The Creatives Team is building the robust, scalable backbone for all creative workflows across the Netflix Ads platform. This includes scaling how quickly advertisers can bring creatives, get them processed, reviewed, and deployed to reach the right member. The team will build creative infrastructure that works across broadening supply sources (SVOD, Live, and FTAB), enables scalability and sophistication (leveraging ML/genAI algorithms), and manages effective distribution for ad decisioning and serving with increased cardinality and flexibility of units across various devices. This is an opportunity to contribute to a rapidly evolving space, enabling autonomy in the CTV marketplace, and defining the next era of advertising at Netflix.

Requirements

Deep Expertise in Distributed Systems: Demonstrated experience designing, building, and maintaining highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems. This includes a strong understanding of concurrency, parallel processing, and microservices architecture.
Fluency in at least one core Programming Languages - Java, Python or Go with a history of writing production-quality, well-tested code.
Operational Excellence and Observability: Experience with setting up and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems (e.g., using tools like Spinnaker, Prometheus, Grafana, or proprietary solutions) to ensure system reliability and quick diagnosis of issues.
Proven Problem-Solving Capability: The ability to tackle complex, ambiguous technical problems and develop pragmatic, long-term solutions.
Strong Collaboration and Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. A history of successfully collaborating with cross-functional teams (e.g., Product Management, Design, and other Engineering teams) is necessary.
Ownership and Drive: A proactive mindset and a strong sense of ownership over the entire software development lifecycle, from initial design through deployment, operations, and eventual deprecation.

Nice To Haves

Experience in the Ads Domain: prior experience building or operating infrastructure specifically for digital advertising, including creative management, ad serving, or campaign optimization platforms, is a significant advantage.
Experience with creative lifecycle management and pipeline development.
Experience with machine learning applications in advertising, particularly in ad review systems.
Experience building large-scale infrastructure for real-time, low-latency online advertising environments.
Knowledge of the CTV space and its unique constraints.

Responsibilities

Designing, building, and maintaining highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed systems.
Writing production-quality, well-tested code in Java, Python, or Go.
Setting up and maintaining comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems.
Tackling complex, ambiguous technical problems and developing pragmatic, long-term solutions.
Collaborating with cross-functional teams (Product Management, Design, other Engineering teams).
Taking ownership of the entire software development lifecycle, from initial design through deployment, operations, and eventual deprecation.