Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing

Netflix•Los Gatos, CA

5d•$499,000 - $900,000

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 our ad-supported tier in November 2022 and are building a world-class, in-house ad tech ecosystem. Ad Eventing is the backbone of that ecosystem — the high-throughput, low-latency pipeline that captures, validates, deduplicates, and processes every ad impression, click, and completion event at Netflix scale. The accuracy and reliability of this data directly powers billing, reporting, pacing, and optimization across the entire ads platform. Our Team The Ad Eventing team sits within the Ad Serving & Decisioning org at Netflix Ads. We own the systems that ingest and process billions of ad events per day — from client-side beacons fired during playback to server-side signals from our ad server. Our work spans real-time event ingestion, deduplication and validation, stream processing pipelines, and the authoritative data contracts that downstream systems (billing, reporting, pacing, ML) depend on. We operate at the intersection of reliability engineering, data infrastructure, and ads domain expertise. We are looking for a senior technical leader to own the technical direction of this pod, set the architectural bar, and drive execution on the hardest problems in event processing at Netflix scale. This is a 60% builder / 40% influencer role: you will write code, ship a proof-of-concept in your first weeks, and earn the trust of an opinionated senior team while simultaneously setting direction across the organization.

Requirements

10+ years building distributed systems and backend services at large scale; 3+ years in the ads domain
Deep experience with high-throughput event ingestion and stream processing at scale — Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalent
Built and operated event deduplication, validation, and attribution systems in an ads or similarly high-stakes data environment
Strong understanding of exactly-once and at-least-once delivery semantics, idempotency patterns, and the tradeoffs between them
Experience designing event schemas and data contracts that serve multiple downstream consumers with different latency and consistency requirements
Familiarity with ad measurement concepts: impression tracking, viewability, click attribution, completion rates, and IAB standards
Track record of technical leadership across multiple teams, setting architectural direction and influencing cross-functional roadmaps
Comfortable at the intersection of engineering, data, and product — translating advertiser reporting requirements and billing accuracy needs into production systems
Demonstrated ability to operate in an environment that is a mix of big-tech scale and startup speed, delivering production-ready results on tight timelines

Nice To Haves

Experience with CTV-specific event challenges: server-side ad insertion (SSAI), VAST/VMAP beacon tracking, live event traffic spikes
Familiarity with third-party measurement and verification integrations (MOAT, IAS, DoubleVerify, Nielsen)
Built or improved billing-grade event pipelines where accuracy directly impacts revenue reconciliation
Experience with experimentation infrastructure for event pipelines: validating schema changes, pipeline migrations, and deduplication logic without impacting downstream consumers
Strong background in resiliency and reliability: ensuring pipeline availability under extreme load (live events, traffic spikes, device-side retry storms)
Familiarity with privacy and compliance constraints on event data (GDPR, CCPA, data minimization)
Experience building observability and alerting frameworks for event pipelines — detecting drops, duplicates, and latency regressions in real time.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction of the Ad Eventing team: architecture reviews, incident leadership, capacity planning, and scaling
Architect and evolve the end-to-end ad event pipeline — from client beacon receipt through validation, deduplication, enrichment, and downstream fan-out — under strict latency and throughput constraints
Scale our event ingestion infrastructure to handle billions of events per day with high availability, exactly-once semantics, and sub-second processing SLAs
Design and implement robust deduplication and validation systems that ensure event accuracy across retries, network failures, and client-side inconsistencies
Build and operate stream processing pipelines (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or equivalent) that power real-time signals for pacing, frequency capping, and reporting
Define and maintain authoritative event schemas and data contracts that serve as the source of truth for billing, advertiser reporting, and ML feature pipelines
Partner closely with Ad Serving, Pacing, Reporting, and Science teams to ensure event data meets the accuracy, latency, and completeness requirements of each consumer
Drive operational excellence: reliability, observability, deployment automation, capacity planning, and incident leadership across the eventing stack
Drive modularization and platform-thinking: build reusable components and clean interfaces that let the team and partner teams move faster