Engineering Manager - Client Delivery & Observability

Netflix•Los Gatos, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Client Delivery & Observability (CDO) team is a newly formed group that owns two connected domains at the heart of Netflix's client engineering: release delivery, the automation platform that safely ships client application updates to Netflix's 320+ million members across TV, TV Connected and mobile devices (tens of thousands of distinct device cohorts); and real-time observability, the streaming analytics and canary analysis infrastructure that detects regressions before they reach members. Together, these systems ensure that every client release, server canary, and A/B test is both safely delivered and continuously monitored. The observability stack includes a multi-region streaming analytics platform built on Mantis, Kafka, and Druid that processes the full firehose of Netflix client telemetry and makes it queryable in seconds; a real-time canary analysis system that uses anytime-valid statistical methods to catch regressions within seconds; and a metric definition framework that lets any product team create real-time metrics without needing to understand the distributed systems underneath. This is a team that operates at the intersection of large-scale infrastructure engineering, release automation, and applied statistical methods. On the observability side, The canary system’s adoption has grown dramatically: metric evaluations increased nearly 10x and the number of A/B tests under automated real-time guardrails grew more than 4x. The system has caught regressions in production within seconds, including during high-stakes live events like WWE and NFL. On the delivery side, the release automation platform orchestrates deployments across all Netflix client surfaces, using A/B-test-based canaries to safely roll out new builds to millions of devices. The team continues to extend these capabilities to support Netflix's expanding live, ads, and gaming businesses. We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead this team through its next phase. You will lead two squads, each with an established tech lead, and your challenge will be to build a unified team identity, set direction across both domains, and rationalize a combined roadmap. The work ahead is compelling: scaling the observability platform to support Netflix's expanding live and ads businesses, advancing the canary analysis toolkit, evolving the release automation platform for new client architectures, and continuing to democratize metric creation across the company. The team partners deeply with experimentation, streaming infrastructure, client platform, developer productivity, and device reliability groups, making cross-functional leadership a core part of the role.

Requirements

Cross-Domain Leadership: You are comfortable leading across distinct technical domains without being the deepest expert in either. You trust your tech leads for domain depth and focus your energy on setting direction, removing obstacles, and connecting the dots between teams.
Context, Not Control: You're allergic to micromanagement. You prefer to give context, delegate, and watch amazing people exceed your hopes and expectations.
People Leader: You are a natural people leader who demonstrates humility. You care deeply about people and their success, investing in your relationships so that you have an understanding of the whole person.
Data-Driven Mindset: You actively utilize data to inform decision-making, take calculated risks, embrace learning from setbacks, and cultivate an environment that prioritizes rapid iteration.
Distributed Team Leadership: You have experience managing remote or hybrid teams across time zones. You build inclusion and cohesion deliberately, not just by proximity.
Strategic Communicator: You are a strong communicator, able to navigate conflict while holding room for dissent, and are expert at gathering and extracting context from diverse partners to align goals, ensuring the team's work is both understood and highly impactful across the organization.

Nice To Haves

10+ years of software or data engineering experience. You have strong depth in distributed systems and large-scale data processing or CI/CD infrastructure.
5+ years of engineering team management experience.
Domain experience in at least one of: real-time data pipelines, release automation and CI/CD infrastructure, or experimentation platforms.
Demonstrable experience leading efforts to build shared tooling, infrastructure, or platform features that enable other engineering teams to move faster and more reliably.
Experience managing or coordinating multiple sub-teams or squads with distinct charters, and coaching or developing tech leads.
Experience leading distributed or hybrid engineering teams across multiple time zones.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Talent Development: You will lead a newly formed team spanning two squads with distinct technical domains, each with its own tech lead. You will hire, coach, and grow a high-performing team of engineers, developing your tech leads into effective technical leaders while fostering the professional growth of the broader team through regular, constructive, and empathetic feedback. You will build a unified team identity across the two squads and ensure that quieter voices have space alongside louder ones. You're not afraid of hard conversations.
Vision & Execution: Develop and execute a unified roadmap that balances two domains: release delivery infrastructure and real-time observability systems. You will rationalize inherited priorities across both squads, coach your team on the design and scaling of robust and reliable systems, and ensure that the team's work compounds rather than fragments.
Cross-Functional Partnership: Build strong relationships across a wide stakeholder surface: client platform teams, streaming infrastructure, experimentation, developer productivity, and device reliability. You will collate and translate complex partner requirements into actionable engineering goals. You'll act as a primary evangelist, extracting context from stakeholders to fill gaps while promoting the team's current and future capabilities.
Operational Excellence: Own the reliability and operational health of the team's production systems. You will drive incident response practices, ensure sustainable on-call rotations, and balance investment in reliability and technical debt against feature delivery. You will establish and track service-level objectives that keep the team accountable to its consumers.