Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ads Policies

Netflix•Los Angeles, CA

5d•$499,000 - $900,000

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 business impact. The Ads Platform Engineering teams build advertising systems and integrations that power ad delivery using Netflix's content delivery ecosystem, including client and server-side ad insertions, content delivery system, ad encoding, and metadata. They deliver ads thoughtfully considering the member's viewing experience and drive outcomes for advertisers, while ensuring advertiser brand safety and appropriate ad content for members. Ads policies are the foundational guidelines that govern what ads can be shown, where they can run, and under what conditions on the Netflix platform. Policies ensure compliance with local regulations and Netflix standards by defining rules for restricted categories, maturity levels, and brand restrictions. The Ads Policies team is responsible for building platform-level components for managing Netflix policies and ensuring their enforcement across the entire ads ecosystem, including creative review, campaign setup, targeting, serving, and reporting. As a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer on Ads Policy Infrastructure, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for the systems that define, govern, evaluate, and explain advertising policy across Netflix's ads ecosystem. You will shape the longer-term architecture of the policy platform and lead highly ambiguous initiatives requiring alignment across Policy, Product, Operations, and multiple engineering teams. This is an individual-contributor role with impact beyond direct implementation, involving establishing technical direction, making durable cross-system decisions, influencing partner roadmaps, and increasing the effectiveness of other engineers while continuing to deliver code, designs, prototypes, and production systems.

Requirements

Deep experience in AdTech in general, experience in Ads Policy or Trust and Safety is a bonus.
A track record of identifying and solving highly complex, ambiguous problems.
Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, ideally on the JVM or a comparable server-side platform.
Demonstrated ability to set longer-term technical strategy and drive architectural decisions across multiple systems or teams.
Strong knowledge of API design, data modeling, schema evolution, versioning, backward compatibility, and correctness-sensitive evaluation.
Understanding of Typescript, UX and UI design principles.
Ability to communicate complex technical issues and business consequences clearly to engineering, product, policy, operations, and leadership audiences.
A record of influencing cross-team roadmaps, resolving conflict, and building durable alignment without relying on formal authority.
Evidence of mentoring and growing engineers, increasing teammates' effectiveness, and scaling impact through others.
Operational excellence, including performance analysis, testing, observability, incident response, and ownership of business-critical production systems.

Nice To Haves

Experience with rules engines, policy or entitlement systems, authorization, risk platforms, or expression evaluation.
Experience with advertising technology, campaign management, ad serving, publisher policy, or creative moderation.
Programmatic advertisement experience
Experience with trust and safety, regulatory compliance, or other domains where incorrect decisions have material consequences.
Experience building high-volume batch evaluation, real-time low-latency decision systems, or multi-tenant platforms.
Familiarity with connected TV, dynamic ad insertion for Live events, or programmatic advertising.
Experience contributing to industry standards or technical working groups such as VAST or OpenRTB.

Responsibilities

Work with Engineering Leadership to set the longer-term technical strategy and architecture for shared policy models, lifecycle and governance services, evaluation paths, and consumer integration contracts.
Establish reliability, scalability, security, and operational standards for systems used across campaign planning, creative review, serving, Live workflows, forecasting, and reporting.
Identify technical gaps and opportunities across teams, communicate their business impact, and influence roadmaps toward solutions that optimize for Netflix rather than a single local system.
Remain hands-on by producing code, designs, prototypes, strategies, and architecture that simplify systems and accelerate delivery.