[Remote] Performance Systems Engineer 5 - Ad Server Platform

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Netflix is a leading entertainment company focused on pushing the boundaries of storytelling and technology. They are seeking a Performance Systems Engineer to optimize their ad serving infrastructure, ensuring peak efficiency and reliability under demanding conditions.

Responsibilities

• Profile and optimize the ad serving runtime for latency, throughput, and resource efficiency across the full request lifecycle: targeting evaluation, policy enforcement, ad selection, and response serialization
• Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks across services: CPU hotspots, GC pressure, memory allocation patterns, thread contention, and network overhead
• Design and run load tests, squeeze tests, and capacity models to validate system behavior under peak and burst traffic (including Live events at NFL scale)
• Establish performance baselines and regression detection: automated benchmarking in CI/CD to catch regressions before they reach production
• Instrument comprehensive latency telemetry, tracing, and profiling across the ad request lifecycle to enable data-driven optimization
• Optimize the rule engine framework and frequency management service for minimal overhead per request as policy complexity grows
• Work closely with the programmatic team on bid request/response performance: QPS management, connection pooling, timeout tuning, and load shedding under pressure
• Drive platform reliability through an efficiency lens: capacity planning, autoscaling tuning, graceful degradation, and cost-per-request optimization
• Own performance SLOs and budgets: define latency budgets per component, track them, and hold teams accountable when budgets are exceeded
• Partner with infrastructure and platform teams to adopt runtime improvements, evaluate hardware configurations, and tune GC strategies

Skills

• 7+ years building and optimizing distributed systems and backend services at scale
• Deep experience with performance engineering: profiling (async-profiler, JFR, flamegraphs), JVM internals (GC tuning, JIT compilation, memory models), and systematic bottleneck analysis
• Strong understanding of latency engineering: cache hierarchies, connection pooling, async I/O, thread pool sizing, and tail latency reduction
• Experience designing and running load tests, squeeze tests, and capacity models for high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems
• Built or operated ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, or real-time bidding infrastructure
• Proficiency in Java, Kotlin, or similar JVM languages with deep understanding of runtime behavior beyond just writing correct code
• Experience with event-driven architectures: Kafka, Flink, or similar stream processing, with a focus on throughput optimization and consumer lag management
• Understanding of ad serving concepts: targeting, frequency capping, publisher controls, programmatic protocols
• Ability to operate in an environment that is a mix of big-tech scale and startup speed
• Experience with CTV constraints: server-side ad insertion, live event ad serving at scale (NFL-sized audiences)
• Built or improved logging and telemetry frameworks for high-throughput request pipelines with minimal performance overhead
• Multi-region deployment experience: active-active architectures, failover, and regional performance variance analysis
• Chaos engineering or SRE practices: error budgets, game days, fault injection, squeeze testing
• Experience with hardware-aware optimization
• Built automated performance regression detection in CI/CD pipelines

Benefits

• 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
• Life and Serious Injury Benefits
• 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

Company Overview

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