Demo

Software Engineer (L5), Systems Optimization

Netflix
Los Gatos, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 12/9/2025
AVAILABLE BEFORE 6/6/2026

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.

Netflix has been changing the way people watch shows and movies and we've built a global Content Delivery Network called Open Connect which sets the standard for video delivery.  We have also recently embarked on a journey to expand into cloud games, stream our content live, serve ads, and more. All this creates an exciting variety of opportunities and technical challenges.

To embrace all these challenges, we are looking to add a software engineer with expertise in analytics and modeling to the Open Connect Control Plane team to continue to craft the scalable, reliable systems needed to build and scale all our offerings.

The role involves building:

  • Cloud services that customers directly hit when they press ‘Play’.

  • Algorithms that smartly steer customers to Open Connect appliances such that they have the best possible Quality-of-Experience, taking into account network latencies, resource availability, and other factors.

  • Algorithms and models to understand and optimize hardware utilization and cost efficiency, evaluated against intuitive and business-critical performance metrics.

  • Operational knobs and tools to quickly diagnose and fix problems as they arise.

We spend our time trying to answer questions like these:

  • What do we need to build in order to be a cost efficient and resilient platform?

  • How do we design our models and systems to adapt appropriately to heterogeneous resource availability and demand, including in real-time?

  • What’s the best way to share system capacity between different games with different resolution and resource demand?

  • How do we make our mathematical models and ML systems easy to operate and understand?

  • What are the performance metrics we can evaluate our systems against over-time?

We are looking for someone who identifies with the following: 

  • You use mathematical approaches to model dynamic systems.

  • You are familiar with modeling techniques and building optimization algorithms, including general ML, static, trend, and time-series.

  • You build robust, responsive, and scalable systems.

  • You are comfortable with ambiguity.

  • You are able to iterate quickly on ideas and incorporate feedback.

  • You care about building quality software that your teammates can support. 

  • You have a passion for operational excellence, educating others, and rigor.

  • You believe that fostering an inclusive environment helps everyone do their best work.

Basic Qualifications:

  • 5 years software development or proficiency with a modern programming language

  • Experience building and operating business-critical, real-time systems and models at scale.

  • Behavioral modeling and analytics experience (e.g. experience with Python, Tensorflow, Spark, SQL, Presto, etc.)

Nice To Have:

  • Distributed Systems Experience (e.g. Java).

  • Basic background in networking concepts.

At Netflix, we carefully consider a wide range of compensation factors to determine your personal top of the market. We rely on market indicators to determine compensation and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to get it right. These considerations can cause your compensation to vary and will also be dependent on your location. 
 

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.

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.

Salary : $100,000 - $720,000

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