Software Engineer 5 - Ads Authorization (AuthZ) Platform

Netflix•Los Gatos, CA

10d•$388,000 - $558,000

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. Since launching our ad-supported tier in 2022, the momentum has been unstoppable—we reach over 94 million global monthly active users! As we enter our fourth year, our ambition is massive, and we are just getting started. The Ads Platform Foundations team builds the core platforms, frameworks, and shared services that accelerate development across the Ads organization. We focus on enabling teams to move faster and build consistently through scalable UI infrastructure, common components, and foundational workflows. Our work also powers access control across domains and underpins core systems such as Public API, GenAI foundations, and the Ads Entity Service — a knowledge graph connecting all Ads entities. Together, we provide the technical backbone that drives consistency, reliability, and velocity across Ads.

Requirements

5–8+ years backend/software engineering experience shipping production systems.
Hands-on experience working on or building an authorization system - solid RBAC fundamentals, with real understanding of roles, permissions, role hierarchies, and resource-level vs. org-level scoping.
Solid conceptual grounding in authz fundamentals - able to reason through tradeoffs between RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC (relationship-based / Zanzibar-style) approaches.
Some exposure to evaluating or integrating a policy engine/framework (Oso, OPA/Rego, Cerbos, OpenFGA, AuthZed/SpiceDB, AWS Cedar) - or having worked on an equivalent in-house.
Strong systems design skills: low-latency decision services, caching, consistency vs. performance tradeoffs.
Proficient in one backend stack (Java/Kotlin/Go/Node/Python).

Nice To Haves

Experience with policy-as-code languages (Rego, Cedar, Polar) or Zanzibar-paper-inspired systems.
Has participated in a build-vs-buy or vendor RFP process before.
Familiarity with AuthN (OAuth/OIDC) and how the AuthN/AuthZ boundary is typically drawn.
Experience on large-scale multi-tenant SaaS platforms.
Experience building this external organizations in a b2b (not just internal access controls)
Open-source contributions to authz projects (OpenFGA, Cerbos, Casbin, etc.).

Responsibilities

Co-drive the build vs. buy evaluation for centralized authorization - contribute to vendor bake-offs (Oso, Permit.io, Cerbos, OpenFGA, AuthZed, AWS Verified Permissions/Cedar) against an in-house option, weighing latency, flexibility, operational cost, and vendor lock-in.
Help design the policy model: roles vs. permissions vs. relations, org-level vs. resource-level roles, role hierarchies, resource ownership/sharing, multi-tenancy.
Partner on the decision engine architecture: low-latency authorization checks, caching, consistency tradeoffs, audit/versioning of policies.
Work with platform/security/IAM teams to integrate authz checks into services (sync and async enforcement points).
Build reference implementations, SDKs, and middleware so other engineering teams can adopt the centralized model instead of ad hoc checks.
Contribute to testing practices (policy unit tests, authorization test suites) and the migration plan from today's scattered checks to a single policy engine.