Distributed Systems Engineer (L6) - Compute Abstractions

Netflix is one of the world's leading streaming entertainment services with over 260 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play pause and resume watching as much as they want anytime anywhere and can change their plans at any time.

Netflix’s Compute organization owns our internet-scale cloud footprint. We constantly innovate to increase fleet-wide agility efficiency and reliability of this infrastructure. We build operate and maintain Compute services so that developers at Netflix can rely on foundational building blocks when entertaining hundreds of millions of customers around the world. To help our internal customers do this the Compute Abstractions team builds products that enable a “set it and forget it” approach to achieving scalability and cost efficiency. Join us as we push the boundaries of performance and resilience empowering developers to create groundbreaking applications on a reliable platform.

We are looking for a highly experienced collaborative engineer to lead our technical charter guide engineering work for the team and break new ground with hands-on innovation on the hardest technical challenges. This engineer will lead the delivery of abstractions that make it incredibly simple for thousands of engineers to do incredibly complicated things. The role will be supported by close partnership with Product Managers cross-functional engineering teams and platform customers.  Understanding our customer’s use cases and building with innovation and customer satisfaction in mind will be the difference maker in your success story.

In this role you will...

• Work closely with Product and Customers to design experiences that anticipate customers' needs before they do and make doing internet scale Compute easy.

• Lead the design of compute resource abstractions used by all of engineering informing trade-offs between complexity and ease-of-use against Netflix-wide business priorities.

• Mentor senior developers in owning the implementation and rollout of complex features that have impact across Netflix.

• Act as a liaison between Compute and other organizations to ensure cohesive changes to deliver cost efficiency and low latency.

• Set the example for operational excellence on the Abstractions team continuously improving incident response on-call and other operational practices.

• Maintain currency on industry trends for new architectures features and off-the-shelf services; guide the team’s decision-making on incorporating industry trends.

• Develop automated systems to test for regressions and performance.

We expect that you have...

• A proven track record of architecting and implementing customer-focused products that define and modify infrastructure at 100M+ user scale.

• Driven wide change at the scale of 100’s to 1000’s of engineers to improve the interaction between engineers infrastructure abstractions and business outcomes such as cost or reliability.

• Architected implemented and owned a distributed system at the scale of 10’s of services or more and learned from at least one notable mistake.

• Experienced technical leadership by empowering the team around you and getting the most from diverse stakeholders including product managers portfolio managers peer engineers and more.

• Provided extensive mentorship and as a result helped other engineers learn new professional skills overcome new challenges and earn promotions to new roles.

• A passion and reputation for building easily usable and maintainable solutions.

You will be successful if you...

• Shine when you have to balance complex customer engineering and other stakeholder needs and are obsessed with optimizing for the customer whenever possible.

• Have the ability to define and self-manage cross-functional projects fueled by ambiguous questions.

• Are a self-starter curious and not afraid to ask when in doubt.

• Are a quick learner and excited about learning new technologies.

• Advocate thoughtful collaboration take pride in your work and enjoy taking full ownership of projects from conception to production.

Bonus points for...

• Experience defining compute resources at scale and understanding the challenges that configurability presents to users;

• Knowledge of building on top of Kubernetes.

• Practical experience with Golang Java and Python.

Our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family background skills and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $230000- $960000.

Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans Mental Health support a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match Stock Option Program Disability Programs Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts Family-forming benefits and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs.  Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation holidays and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off. See more details about our Benefits here .

Netflix is a unique culture and environment.  Learn more here .

We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity recognizing that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color ancestry national origin caste sex sexual orientation gender gender identity or expression age disability medical condition pregnancy genetic makeup marital status or military service.