Job Description
Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with 278 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.
The Role
Content Infrastructure & Solutions (CIS) empowers engineers working on content and studio applications to be innovative and agile in supporting our massive global content production needs. We do that by providing scalable and resilient infrastructure to address integrated large-scale media, assets, data, workflow, and communication use cases. Examples of this organization’s work include massive-scale media processing platforms (1, 2), workflows (conductor), and data processing at scale.
The Content MiddleWare Infrastructure team(MWI), a part of the Content Infrastructure & Solutions group, provides Studio and Content Engineering specific, highly leveraged, and fully managed data, workflow, and messaging & communication platforms facilitating the goal of the Connected Studio. To learn more about what the MWI team does, check out the following tech blogs: workflow (1, 2), search (1, 2, 3), and data movement (1, 2).
This team will own Graph Search (1, 2, 3), a Search-as-a-Service platform, within the MWI Data team. Graph Search streamlines search functions across various entities and workflows, notably in the Content Engineering domains but not limited to them. It offers a unified user experience encompassing both backend services and reusable front-end components. Graph Search is currently leveraged by around 70 applications and serves thousands of end users. This team may also contribute to the other infrastructure such as Ontology, SDSP, EARS, and RAW Hollow by collaborating with the rest of the MWI Data term in the US.
What we are looking for
In General
You are self-motivated and can work independently, while also being able to partner closely with other engineers on a project. You are passionate about building quality products and want to own development end-to-end, leading with the right architecture, and following sound engineering principles to deliver maintainable, performant and highly developer-friendly experience. You are a problem solver and like to challenge yourself, but you are not afraid to reach out when you need help, enjoy helping other engineers and find mentoring junior engineers satisfying. In your current role you may act as a formal or informal tech lead.
Preferred Qualifications
Even if you feel that you don’t feel that you fully meet these preferred qualifications, if you’re interested in the area or have had some exposure, we’d encourage you to reach out.
Experience leading and delivering complex projects – You have a proven track record of leading projects from inception to completion. Whether working independently or collaborating with a larger team, you can prioritize, make trade-offs, and drive progress to meet critical deadlines. You’re comfortable managing the scope of work, communicating effectively with stakeholders, and delivering solutions that align with both short-term needs and long-term goals.
Experience with cross-functional collaboration—Working across teams is essential in our environment. You can partner with product managers, stakeholders, and other engineering teams to build and ship impactful features. You can easily navigate between technical discussions and high-level business conversations, ensuring alignment between different stakeholders while delivering a cohesive solution.
Strong decision-making skills in ambiguous situations – Senior engineers are often looked to for guidance in the face of uncertainty. You can make clear, informed decisions when details are fuzzy, balancing the need for technical innovation with business goals. Whether it’s selecting the right tool for a task, making architecture decisions, or addressing unexpected challenges, you’re capable of leading your team through ambiguity with confidence.
Experience working full stack - Some engineers are stronger on the frontend others are stronger on the backend, but you’re not afraid to work full stack. We typically use Java on the backend and Typescript/React + GraphQL on the frontend, but we understand that good engineers can work in many different languages and frameworks.
Experience operating a production system to a high degree of operational excellence: For both teams, this is a critical skill set. Graph Search is a critical service for engineering, and must be highly reliable. To effectively build operational tooling, you should know what it’s like to operate a service yourself. Likewise, the reliability of operational tooling needs to be incredibly high since these are tools that other engineers rely on to tell them if something is going wrong and to troubleshoot issues.
Experience building platforms, tooling or infrastructure for other engineers - Building services and tooling for other engineers to consume is a bit different than building line of business applications or standard microservices. A strong platform and infrastructure mindset, long term thinking, and the ability to understand what other engineers need will set you up for success in this role.
You have a passion for clean, well-tested performant code - This means you are dedicated to writing code that is not only functional but also maintainable and efficient. You understand the importance of comprehensive testing to ensure reliability and prevent future issues. You strive for optimal performance in your code, focusing on speed and resource efficiency. Your commitment to these principles helps create robust and scalable systems that other engineers can depend on and build upon with confidence.
Nice to have
Experience in building scalable and reliable search or data infrastructure for use by engineering stakeholders.
Experience with Elasticsearch, in creating efficient indexing strategies, crafting complex queries, and implementing advanced features such as search suggestions, facets for filtering, and ranking algorithms to enhance search relevance and user experience.
Experience building UI components that other teams can embed
Deep GraphQL experience
We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, color, place of birth, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, military service status or disability status.
