Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing

What You'll Do

• Own the technical direction of the Ad Eventing team: architecture reviews, incident leadership, capacity planning, and scaling
• Architect and evolve the end-to-end ad event pipeline — from client beacon receipt through validation, deduplication, enrichment, and downstream fan-out — under strict latency and throughput constraints
• Scale our event ingestion infrastructure to handle billions of events per day with high availability, exactly-once semantics, and sub-second processing SLAs
• Design and implement robust deduplication and validation systems that ensure event accuracy across retries, network failures, and client-side inconsistencies
• Build and operate stream processing pipelines
• (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or equivalent) that power real-time signals for pacing, frequency capping, and reporting
• Define and maintain authoritative event schemas and data contracts that serve as the source of truth for billing, advertiser reporting, and ML feature pipelines
• Partner closely with Ad Serving, Pacing, Reporting, and Science teams to ensure event data meets the accuracy, latency, and completeness requirements of each consumer

Drive operational excellence

reliability, observability, deployment automation, capacity planning, and incident leadership across the eventing stack

Drive modularization and platform-thinking

build reusable components and clean interfaces that let the team and partner teams move faster

Skills & Experience We're Seeking

• 10+ years building distributed systems and backend services at large scale;
• 3+ years in the ads domain
• Deep experience with high-throughput event ingestion and stream processing at scale — Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or equivalent
• Built and operated event deduplication, validation, and attribution systems in an ads or similarly high-stakes data environment
• Strong understanding of exactly-once and at-least-once delivery semantics
• , idempotency patterns, and the tradeoffs between them
• Experience designing event schemas and data contracts that serve multiple downstream consumers with different latency and consistency requirements

Familiarity with ad measurement concepts

• impression tracking, viewability, click attribution, completion rates, and IAB standards
• Track record of technical leadership across multiple teams
• , setting architectural direction and influencing cross-functional roadmaps

Comfortable at the intersection of engineering, data, and product

• translating advertiser reporting requirements and billing accuracy needs into production systems

Additional information

Demonstrated ability to operate in an environment that is a mix of big-tech scale and startup speed, delivering production-ready results on tight timelines

Nice to Haves

• Experience with
• CTV-specific event challenges
• : server-side ad insertion (SSAI), VAST/VMAP beacon tracking, live event traffic spikes
• Familiarity with third-party measurement and verification integrations (MOAT, IAS, DoubleVerify, Nielsen)
• Built or improved billing-grade event pipelines where accuracy directly impacts revenue reconciliation
• Experience with experimentation infrastructure for event pipelines: validating schema changes, pipeline migrations, and deduplication logic without impacting downstream consumers
• Strong background in resiliency and reliability
• : ensuring pipeline availability under extreme load (live events, traffic spikes, device-side retry storms)
• Familiarity with privacy and compliance constraints on event data (GDPR, CCPA, data minimization)
• Experience building observability and alerting frameworks for event pipelines — detecting drops, duplicates, and latency regressions in real time.

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 $499,000.00 - $900,000.00.

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.