Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing
$499,000–$900,000 year
On-site · New York City, New York, United States or Los Gatos, California, United States
Job Summary
Distributed Systems Engineer 6 at Netflix leading the Ad Eventing team — owning architectural direction, incident leadership, and scalable end-to-end ad event pipelines (client beacons to downstream fans-out) with sub-second processing and exactly-once semantics. The role blends code delivery (proof-of-concept in early weeks) with broad influence across orgs (Ad Serving, Pacing, Reporting, and Science) to ensure data accuracy, latency, and completeness for billing, reporting, and ML feature pipelines. Responsibilities include architecture reviews, capacity planning, reliability and observability, deployment automation, and building reusable components to move multiple teams faster. Key focus areas include real-time ingestion at scale (Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming), deduplication and validation systems, end-to-end event schemas and data contracts, and collaboration across engineering, data, and product to translate advertiser reporting requirements into production systems. Strong ownership of the technical direction for a high-scale, ads-focused data platform, with a track record of technical leadership and delivering production-ready results under tight timelines.
Required Qualifications
- 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
- 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 have experience with CTV-specific event challenges (SSAI, VAST/VMAP beacon tracking)
- 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
- Familiarity with privacy and compliance constraints on event data (GDPR, CCPA)
- Experience building observability and alerting frameworks for event pipelines — detecting drops, duplicates, and latency regressions in real time
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