Software Engineer 5— Platform Modernization Engineering

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time.

About the Team

The Platform Modernization Engineering (PME) — Migrations team exists to accelerate Netflix's ability to evolve its infrastructure by driving safe, scalable migrations across the stack. We reduce engineering toil, eliminate technical debt, and enable teams to move forward with confidence as Netflix's technology continues to evolve at pace.

We are not a feature delivery team. We are a revenue protector and accelerator — through our work we enable faster feature delivery, innovation, and security protection across the entire engineering organization.

Netflix operates one of the most sophisticated and high-scale engineering platforms in the world. Keeping that platform on the leading edge requires continuous, intentional modernization. The Paved Path — our curated set of recommended, well-supported infrastructure standards — is constantly advancing as Netflix pushes into new technical territory. Our team exists to bring the fleet along with it: setting clear baselines, accelerating adoption across thousands of services, and protecting that progress from erosion over time. We affect both engineering culture and engineering quality at scale.

We operate in pods (3–6 month cycles), partnering closely with the most strategically critical initiatives across Infrastructure Engineering. We build the automation and tooling that lets us execute these at a scale and speed no manual effort could match, including AI-assisted code modification pipelines and fleet-wide orchestration systems.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced L5 Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of large-scale systems, automation, and cross-functional influence. You will design and build the tooling and automation that powers fleet-wide migration campaigns, partner directly with platform and product teams to de-risk complex infrastructure changes, and help define what excellent Paved Path adoption looks like in practice at Netflix.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. You will own migration projects end-to-end — from scoping and technical design through automated execution, quality validation, and completion. You'll also build durable tooling that outlasts any single campaign.

Key Responsibilities

Migration Engineering
Design and execute large-scale code and infrastructure migration campaigns across Netflix's fleet of thousands of repositories and services. Own the full lifecycle: scoping, campaign design, automated execution, validation, and completion.

Automation & Tooling
Build and extend PME's internal automation platforms — leveraging AI-assisted code modification, rule-based transformations, and batch orchestration — to scale the team's impact across the fleet with speed and reliability.

Technical Design
Write clear, well-researched design documents. Identify and communicate tradeoffs between migration approaches and drive decisions with data and stakeholder input.

Cross-Functional Partnership
Embed with partner teams driving the most crucial infrastructure-level strategic initiatives to deeply understand migration needs, de-risk project execution, and ensure campaigns land successfully with minimal customer toil.

Paved Path Advocacy
Proactively identify opportunities to improve Paved Path adoption and adherence. Surface patterns and systemic opportunities — then act on them. Influence product strategy and roadmaps of platform teams through direct engagement and data.

Operational Excellence
Instrument migrations with telemetry and dashboards. Monitor fleet health, track adoption rates, and build the feedback loops that continuously improve campaign design and execution.

Who You Are

A strong generalist engineer energized by scope and ambiguity — comfortable working across the full stack (backend services, automation pipelines, data models, dashboards) while building depth in the areas that matter most.

A systems thinker who understands that successful migrations are as much about people and process as they are about code — and designs solutions accordingly.

A self-directed owner who can take a high-priority, ambiguous challenge and drive it to completion across teams, time zones, and organizational boundaries.

Someone who builds customer trust through repeated, low-drama delivery. You communicate proactively, course-correct quickly, and leave things better than you found them.

A pragmatic builder who defaults to automation and reuse, builds tools that generalize beyond a single use case, and knows when to ship fast vs. when to invest in durability.

Required Experience

• Strong backend engineering skills, with demonstrated ability to build and operate production services at scale (experience in Java or Python is a plus)

• Proven experience navigating and operating within large, complex infrastructure ecosystems — understanding service interdependencies, fleet-wide patterns, and the ripple effects of change at scale

• Deep, hands-on experience with AI-driven solutions — not as a user, but as a builder. You follow where the technology is going, form opinions, and bring that edge into the work

• Proven ability to drive complex, cross-functional technical projects from design through completion

• Strong technical writing: design docs, tradeoff analyses, postmortems

• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred: EC2, S3, EKS/Kubernetes)

• Ability to navigate ambiguity, influence without authority, and partner effectively with senior stakeholders

Experience We'd Be Excited About

• Experience with large-scale code migration or modernization campaigns

• Demonstrated ability to build with or integrate LLMs and AI agents into engineering workflows — you have shipped AI-powered solutions, not just experimented with them

• Experience building or operating fleet-management, dependency graph, or service catalog systems

• Background in platform or infrastructure engineering organizations

• Familiarity with Java or Python in a backend services context

• Experience designing campaigns with measurable adoption and adherence metricsa

Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.