Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Ad Serving

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.

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.

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.

Skills & Experience We’re Seeking

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

• Experience building ad servers, SSPs, or DSPs.

• Experience building components for pacing, ranking, scoring, and delivery.

• Experience with real-time bidding (RTB) protocols, server-side auctions, and bidding dynamics.

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

• Strong understanding of inventory management, demand/supply optimization, and forecasting methodologies.

• 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

• Contributed to an ads industry technology standard or worked on an industry consortium effort, working group etc.

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

• Experience collaborating with Ads operation teams

• Familiarity with handling data at extremely large volumes.

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

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, F