Distributed Systems Engineer Jobs in San Jose, CA

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.
In April 2022, we introduced a new, more affordable, ad-supported tier for our customers, marking a significant milestone for Netflix. Our focus is now on expanding choices for consumers and providing advertisers with a premium TV brand experience that surpasses traditional linear formats. The challenge ahead involves scaling our ad tech to maximize its impact on our business.
Our Team
The Ads Platform Engineering teams build advertising systems and integrations that power the delivery of ads using our world-class content delivery ecosystem. We use a number of Netflix investments and innovations to power our ads - unique mix of client and server-side ad insertions, state of the art content delivery system, ad encoding recipes, content understanding and metadata. We deliver ads in a manner that's thoughtful of our member's viewing experience and drive great outcomes for advertisers. We also ensure that advertiser brand safety is ensured during serving, members only see the most appropriate ads for them.
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 that every ad campaign complies with both local regulations and Netflix standards, by defining rules related to restricted categories, maturity levels, and brand restrictions. The Ads Policies team is responsible for building the platform-level components required for managing Netflix policies and ensuring their enforcement across the entire ads ecosystem, including creative review, campaign setup, targeting, serving and reporting.
The Role
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 whose success depends on alignment across Policy, Product, Operations, and multiple engineering teams.
This is an individual-contributor role with impact beyond direct implementation. You will establish technical direction, make durable cross-system decisions, influence partner roadmaps, and increase the effectiveness of other engineers while continuing to deliver code, designs, prototypes, and production systems.
What You'll Do

• 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.

Skills & Experience We're Seeking

• 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.

Generally, 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 $499,000.00 - $900,000.00.
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.
Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.
We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity 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.