Distributed Systems Engineer (L5) - Compute Abstractions

Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with 283 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.

The Role

 About Cloud Infrastructure

Netflix has been on the leading edge of cloud adoption since migrating to AWS 15 years ago and runs one of the largest Cloud footprints. The Cloud Engineering organization exists to manage that massive scale, constantly innovating to increase fleet-wide agility, efficiency, and reliability of the Netflix cloud infrastructure, while solving scale problems that we are the first to ever hit. We build, operate, and maintain Compute, Network, and Storage services so that developers at Netflix can rely on foundational building blocks when entertaining hundreds of millions of customers globally.

About the Team

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.

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled and accomplished engineer with demonstrable experience in evolving large-scale infrastructure systems and abstractions on that infrastructure. The ideal candidate will bring a combination of leading innovative solutions across functional teams and hands-on development experience in complex distributed systems, backend services, AWS/cloud, and Kubernetes.

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 computing easy.

• Design compute abstractions used by all of engineering, informing trade-offs between complexity and ease-of-use against Netflix-wide business priorities. 

• Mentor peer engineers in building, maintaining, and deploying complex features that have an impact across all of Netflix.

• Drive 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; make recommendations on incorporating industry trends.

• Develop automated systems to test for regressions and performance.

Qualifications:

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

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

• You’ve 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.

• You’re a seasoned mentor who has helped other engineers learn new professional skills, overcome new challenges, and earn promotions to new roles.

• Your peers are sad when you leave a role because everything you build is so easy to use and maintain.

• Your stakeholders are sad when you leave because you so readily understood their needs that even when you had to say “no” they didn’t feel bad about it.

• You have a passion for building for ease of use for the customer.

You will be successful in this role 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.

Nice to have:

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

• Knowledge of building on top of Kubernetes. 

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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 $100,000 - $720,000.

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 detail about our Benefits 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.

Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.