Netflix

Engineering Manager - Client Delivery & Observability

Netflix$436K — $500K+*
Consumer Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in software or data engineering, especially in distributed systems and large-scale data processing or CI/CD infrastructure.
  • 5+ years of engineering management experience leading teams.
  • Domain knowledge in real-time data pipelines, release automation, or experimentation platforms.
  • Proven experience in developing shared tooling and infrastructure to enhance team performance.
  • Experience managing distinct sub-teams or squads and fostering leadership in technical leads.

Responsibilities

  • Lead a dual-squad team, fostering identity and direction across teams.
  • Develop and execute a cohesive roadmap for release delivery and observability systems.
  • Cultivate relationships with stakeholders to translate requirements into engineering goals.
  • Oversee the reliability of production systems and manage incident response strategies.
  • Drive team accountability via service-level objectives and operational excellence.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health plans and mental health support.
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
  • Flexible time-off policy for salaried employees.
  • Generous paid time off for full-time hourly employees with 35 days accrued annually.
  • Stock option program and various disability benefits.
Full Job Description
The Opportunity:

The Client Delivery & Observability (CDO) team is a newly formed group that owns two connected domains at the heart of Netflix's client engineering: release delivery, the automation platform that safely ships client application updates to Netflix's over 300 million members across TV, TV Connected and mobile devices and real-time observability, the streaming analytics and canary analysis infrastructure that detects regressions before they reach members. Together, these systems ensure that every client release, server canary, and A/B test is both safely delivered and continuously monitored. The observability stack includes a multi-region streaming analytics platform built on Mantis, Kafka, and Druid that processes the full firehose of Netflix client telemetry This is a team that operates at the intersection of large-scale infrastructure engineering, release automation, and applied statistical methods. The system has caught regressions in production within seconds and on the delivery side, the release automation platform orchestrates deployments across all Netflix client surfaces, using A/B-test-based canaries to safely roll out new builds to millions of devices. The team continues to extend these capabilities to support Netflix's expanding live, ads, and gaming businesses.

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead this team through its next phase. You will lead two squads, each with an established tech lead, and your challenge will be to build a unified team identity, set direction across both domains, and rationalize a combined roadmap. The work ahead is compelling and includes scaling the observability platform to support Netflix's expanding live and ads businesses, advancing the canary analysis toolkit, evolving the release automation platform for new client architectures. The team partners deeply with experimentation, streaming infrastructure, client platform, developer productivity, and device reliability groups, making cross-functional leadership a core part of the role.

Links to Some of Our Work:

Responsibilities:
  • Team Leadership & Talent Development: You will lead a newly formed team spanning two squads with distinct technical domains, each with its own tech lead. You will hire, coach, and grow a high-performing team of engineers, developing your tech leads into effective technical leaders while fostering the professional growth of the broader team through regular, constructive, and empathetic feedback. You will build a unified team identity across the two squads and ensure that quieter voices have space alongside louder ones. You're not afraid of hard conversations.

  • Vision & Execution: Develop and execute a unified roadmap that balances two domains: release delivery infrastructure and real-time observability systems. You will rationalize inherited priorities across both squads, coach your team on the design and scaling of robust and reliable systems, and ensure that the team's work compounds rather than fragments.

  • Cross-Functional Partnership:Build strong relationships across a wide stakeholder surface: client platform teams, streaming infrastructure, experimentation, developer productivity, and device reliability. You will collate and translate complex partner requirements into actionable engineering goals. You'll act as a primary evangelist, extracting context from stakeholders to fill gaps while promoting the team's current and future capabilities.

  • Operational Excellence: Own the reliability and operational health of the team's production systems. You will drive incident response practices, ensure sustainable on-call rotations, and balance investment in reliability and technical debt against feature delivery. You will establish and track service-level objectives that keep the team accountable to its consumers.

Skills & Characteristics:
  • Cross-Domain Leadership: You are comfortable leading across distinct technical domains without being the deepest expert in either. You trust your tech leads for domain depth and focus your energy on setting direction, removing obstacles, and connecting the dots between teams.

  • Context, Not Control: You're allergic to micromanagement. You prefer to give context, delegate, and watch amazing people exceed your hopes and expectations.

  • People Leader:You are a natural people leader who demonstrates humility. You care deeply about people and their success, investing in your relationships so that you have an understanding of the whole person.

  • Data-Driven Mindset:You actively utilize data to inform decision-making, take calculated risks, embrace learning from setbacks, and cultivate an environment that prioritizes rapid iteration.

  • Distributed Team Leadership: You have experience managing remote or hybrid teams across time zones. You build inclusion and cohesion deliberately, not just by proximity.

  • Strategic Communicator:You are a strong communicator, able to navigate conflict while holding room for dissent, and are expert at gathering and extracting context from diverse partners to align goals, ensuring the team's work is both understood and highly impactful across the organization.

Preferred Requirements:
  • 10+ years of software or data engineering experience. You have strong depth in distributed systems and large-scale data processing or CI/CD infrastructure.

  • 5+ years of engineering team management experience.

  • Domain experience in at least one of: real-time data pipelines, release automation and CI/CD infrastructure, or experimentation platforms.

  • Demonstrable experience leading efforts to build shared tooling, infrastructure, or platform features that enable other engineering teams to move faster and more reliably.

  • Experience managing or coordinating multiple sub-teams or squads with distinct charters, and coaching or developing tech leads.

  • Experience leading distributed or hybrid engineering teams across multiple time zones.

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 $436,000.00 - $710,000.00.

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. Learn more here.

About Netflix

Netflix, Inc. is an American media company founded on August 29, 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, and currently based in Los Gatos, California, with production offices and stages at the Los Angeles-based Hollywood studios (formerly old Warner Brothers studios) and the Albuquerque Studios (formerly ABQ studios). It operates an eponymous over-the-top subscription video on-demand service, which showcases acquired and original programming as well as third-party content licensed from other production companies and distributors. Netflix is also the first streaming media company to be a member of the Motion Picture Association.
Learn more about Netflix
Size
11,300 employees
Market Cap
$127.6 billion
Industry
Net Income
$2.7 billion
Founded
1997
5 Year Trend
+27.5%
Revenue
$24.9 billion
NASDAQ

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