Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Live Ad Serving

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 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.

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.

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.

This Ad Serving team is dedicated to building and maintaining a robust, scalable, and efficient infrastructure that forms the backbone of Netflix's advertising ecosystem. Our mission is to ensure seamless and reliable delivery of ads across all platforms, devices, and user environments. We aim to support Netflix's revenue growth (advertising initiatives) by enabling the effective monetization of content, delivering exceptional outcomes for advertisers, enhancing the viewing experience for our members, and driving strategic value for Netflix. 

This role is part of the company's strategic initiative to build a world-class advertising ecosystem following the launch of their ad-supported tier. We are looking for highly motivated engineers working in the advertising space who are excited to join us on this journey.

The Role

Architect and build the distributed backend systems that enable real-time dynamic ad insertion (DAI) for live events. This is a technically challenging role focused on achieving ultra-low latency, large-scale performance, and end-to-end reliability. You will work at the intersection of large-scale streaming, advertising, and cloud infrastructure, ensuring seamless ad serving for tens of millions of concurrent viewers during live events, while maintaining an exceptional member experience.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, design, and implement distributed systems for serving ads in live events 

• Develop and operate the ad-insertion logic, including ad decisioning, pod construction, and manifest manipulation for server-side ad insertion (SSAI).

• Build in-event tooling, monitoring dashboards, and alerting systems to ensure platform reliability and operational visibility during live events.

• Drive operational excellence by leading capacity planning, managing incidents, and conducting thorough post-mortem reviews.

• Ensure observability, scalability, and fault tolerance for ad systems adapting to unpredictable traffic spikes.

• Maintain expertise in ad-tech standards (VAST, VMAP, SCTE-35) and emerging streaming technologies.

Skills and Experience We're Seeking

• 7+ years of experience, 4+ years of experience in the Ads domain

• Experience working with ads on Live content

• Experience building ad servers, SSPs, or DSPs.

• Experience building and operating highly-available distributed systems and backend services at large scale.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills for effective work with internal and external stakeholders.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities effectively.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in the CTV space and knowledge of its unique constraints

• Experience with virtual ad technologies for live content, such as dynamic billboards, product placement, or in-stream overlays.

• Experience designing and launching programmatic ad solutions for live events, including hybrid pods that combine programmatic and pre-sold inventory.

• Familiarity with building end-to-end ML model deployment and inference infrastructure for low-latency real-time ad systems in live content environments.

• Strong understanding of advertising concepts: publisher policies, frequency caps, and targeting.

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 $170,000 - $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.

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.

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