Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Core Ad Serving Platform

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.

What You’ll Do

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.

Skills & Experience We’re Seeking

• 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 that support complex, multi-service ecosystems.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to partner effectively with cross-functional product and engineering teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in the CTV space and familiarity with its unique delivery constraints.
• Expertise in high-throughput data processing systems and telemetry frameworks for large-scale production environments.
• Familiarity with cloud-native infrastructure, deployment automation, and SLO-driven development.

Pay and benefits

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 $388,000.00 - $619,000.00.

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.

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.