Distributed Systems Engineer - Ad Eventing

Position: Distributed Systems Engineer 6 - Ad Eventing
At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.

We launched our ad-supported tier in November 2022 and are building a world-class, in-house ad tech ecosystem. Ad Eventing is the backbone of that ecosystem — the high-throughput, low-latency pipeline that captures, validates, deduplicates, and processes every ad impression, click, and completion event at Netflix scale. The accuracy and reliability of this data directly powers billing, reporting, pacing, and optimization across the entire ads platform.

Our Team The Ad Eventing team sits within the Ad Serving & Decisioning org at Netflix Ads. We own the systems that ingest and process billions of ad events per day — from client-side beacons fired during playback to server-side signals from our ad server. Our work spans real-time event ingestion, deduplication and validation, stream processing pipelines, and the authoritative data contracts that downstream systems (billing, reporting, pacing, ML) depend on.

We operate at the intersection of reliability engineering, data infrastructure, and ads domain expertise.

We are looking for a senior technical leader to own the technical direction of this pod, set the architectural bar, and drive execution on the hardest problems in event processing at Netflix scale. This is a 60% builder / 40% influencer role: you will write code, ship a proof-of-concept in your first weeks, and earn the trust of an opinionated senior team while simultaneously setting direction across the organization.

What You'll DoOwn 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 SLAsDesign 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…