Program Manager, Human Evaluations (Recommendations)

Job Description

Great recommendations are how members find something worth their time. We are looking for an experienced Human Evaluations Program Manager to help us measure and improve the quality of recommendations across the Netflix homepage and discovery experience. You will work alongside Product Management and ML teams to build the human evaluation programs that tell us whether recommendations are working for members, and where they are not.

About the Role

Netflix is building toward more relevant, more varied, and more trustworthy recommendations, and thoughtful, high-quality evaluation is essential to making sure we are moving in the right direction. Join a team creating the frameworks, tools, and workflows that ensure human judgment is applied with consistency, clarity, and care, whether we are evaluating relevance, repetition, diversity, or whether a recommendation simply makes sense to the member.

You will not only shape how human evaluations of our recommendations are designed, but also own the day-to-day execution. From scoping and planning to vendor management, rater onboarding, and calibration, you will be accountable for driving delivery from start to finish. Just as critically, you will act as a thought partner to Product Management, helping translate recommendation strategy into evaluation designs and building a shared language around recommendation quality across teams.

The Opportunity

In this role, you will partner across product, research, data science, UX, and engineering to develop rubrics, frameworks, and workflows that enable rigorous, scalable human evaluation of recommendations. Beyond shaping the "what" and "how," you will also lead the "when" and "done." You will keep evaluation projects on track, ensuring consistent execution, timely delivery, efficient use of vendor capacity, and high rater alignment. If you are excited to bring structure to ambiguity and influence what members see when they open Netflix, while being accountable for tangible delivery, this is your chance to create meaningful impact from day one.

The Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate brings a rare combination of structure and flexibility. You know how to create evaluation frameworks that are rigorous and scalable, and you are also a driver who gets them out the door. You are skilled at translating product strategy into evaluation workflows, defining milestones, managing vendors, and delivering consistent results in a dynamic environment. You can steer teams across functions, keep timelines on track, and ensure rater quality without micromanaging. You are curious about how personalization works and can build credibility with PMs, data scientists, and ML engineers. You have working fluency in film and TV content and can quickly scan a set of titles to tell whether they belong together. You thrive in spaces where there is no roadmap, and you take pride in making things real, not just possible.

Responsibilities:

• Lead end-to-end execution of human evaluation and data operations initiatives, from intake and scoping to delivery
• Partner with Product Management to translate recommendation strategy and roadmap priorities into evaluation designs, success metrics, and timelines
• Manage human annotation vendors, including capacity planning, SLAs, quality performance, and escalations
• Drive operational efficiency across evaluation programs, including cost per task, throughput, turnaround time, and speed to IRR
• Develop clear, scalable guidelines and scoring rubrics to ensure consistent rater judgment, including for subjective, taste-based questions
• Oversee rater onboarding, calibration, and QA workflows
• Pilot and refine evaluation tasks to improve clarity, inter-rater reliability, and feedback quality
• Anticipate and resolve bottlenecks and blockers
• Act as the connective tissue across product, ML, data science, and vendor partners to ensure alignment and effective execution of evaluations at scale
  

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience working in human evaluations, data collection, labeling, or annotation operations in ML environments
• Track record of implementing process improvements or quality control systems for data collection needs
• Prior experience managing human annotation vendors, raters, or data labeling teams, including vendor performance and cost management
• Experience improving operational efficiency of annotation programs (throughput, turnaround, cost)
• Strong understanding of evaluation design, including guidelines, rubrics, and scoring protocols
• Working fluency in film and TV content, including genres, formats, and talent
• Proven ability in end-to-end management of complex, cross-functional programs, demonstrating strong Program Management skills and clear accountability for successful delivery
• Experience with human labeling platforms
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to synthesize feedback into clear recommendations and process improvements
• Familiarity with how rater subjectivity and bias affect taste-based judgments, and how to account for them in evaluation design
• Strong organizational skills and executional focus; ability to track details while seeing the bigger picture
  

Nice To Have

• Experience with personalization, recommender systems, search, or ranking evaluation
• Familiarity with how offline human evaluation complements online experimentation (A/B tests) and engagement metrics
• Experience evaluating at the list or page level, not only the individual item level
• Experience partnering with Product Managers and Data Scientists on metric definition

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.

Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.