Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Core Ad Serving Platform

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.

We launched a new ad-supported tier in November 2022 and are building an in-house world-class ad tech ecosystem to offer our members more choices in consuming their content. Our new tier allows us to attract new members at a lower price point while also creating a compelling path for advertisers to reach deeply engaged audiences.

The Ads Platform Engineering team is the heartbeat of our monetization engine. We are builders, not just architects. Our team is responsible for the mission-critical infrastructure that orchestrates ad decisioning, policy enforcement, and delivery across our global content ecosystem. We operate on a "context over control" philosophy, empowering you to make high-impact technical decisions that shape the future of our advertising technology. We don't just design systems; we ship production code that handles massive scale, ensuring a seamless, low-latency viewing experience for our members while delivering exceptional outcomes for advertisers.

The Core Ad Serving Platform team designs and builds scalable, modular backend frameworks and libraries that serve as the foundation of ads platform. You will focus on creating resilient systems that power a wide range of ad products and features while ensuring high availability, low latency, and maintainability as the platform evolves.

* Dynamic: You thrive in critically impactful environments where you maintain platform stability under high throughput.

* Hands-on Ownership: You are a builder. You’re comfortable navigating complex distributed systems, identifying bottlenecks, and writing code to solve them—not just whiteboarding solutions. You own the full lifecycle of your services—from design and deployment to capacity modeling and incident response.

* Contextual Decision Making: You possess the judgment to align technical tradeoffs with business goals, ensuring our ad serving infrastructure scales gracefully as we continue to grow.

* Architect and operate backend services for core ad decisioning: Design and build scalable, modular backend frameworks for targeting, frequency management, pacing, and policy enforcement.

* Design APIs and data models: Create clean, scalable interfaces and data schemas that enable seamless interoperability across the Ad Platform ecosystem.

* Optimize high-throughput serving: Build services that manage ad selection and delivery consistency, ensuring low-latency performance in high-traffic, distributed environments.

* Drive operational excellence: Implement SLO-driven development and proactive capacity planning, and own the incident response lifecycle for the core serving stack.

* Instrument platform reliability: Develop comprehensive diagnostics, logging, and telemetry frameworks to ensure deep observability into system health and reliability.

* Maintain ad-tech domain expertise: Utilize deep knowledge of advertising concepts (publisher policies, frequency caps, targeting) to ensure the platform meets industry standards and business requirements.

* 7+ years of experience, with at least 4+ years in the Ads domain.

* Expertise in building and operating highly-available, distributed systems at massive scale.

* Hands-on experience building core ad server components: decisioning logic, ad selection, pacing, ranking, scoring, and frequency capping.

* Deep understanding of ad-tech ecosystem standards and business requirements (e.g., targeting, policy enforcement, and frequency management).

* Proven ability to design scalable APIs and data models