Software Engineer (L6) - SVOD Transport Protocol Development

Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services with 278 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.

The Role

Netflix is the world's leading streaming entertainment service. Almost 270 million households across 190+ countries now subscribe to Netflix, enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films in a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can watch as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen. 

Among other functions, Open Connect provides highly available, worldwide infrastructure for content production, processing, and distribution across all Netflix productions and licensed content. A core aspect of this is serving entertainment in the form of streaming video on demand (SVOD) and ultra-low-latency interactive cloud gaming over the public Internet.

We are looking for a highly skilled software engineer with experience in designing, tuning, and implementing high-performance transport algorithms and TCP stacks for delivering SVOD content.

You intimately understand the impact of dynamic Internet paths on SVOD content delivery and the challenges of SVOD coexisting with interactive cloud gaming. You will help refine and improve our heuristics for congestion control, loss recovery, and packet pacing for TCP-based media streams; collaborate effectively with colleagues to design and deploy innovative ideas into production; provide rapid debugging of production transport stack issues; and work closely with server, client and data analytics colleagues to improve our lab-based and production (A/B) testing techniques for evaluating service performance. 

In this role, you will have the opportunity to directly impact core and emerging areas of our business. We provide the freedom to execute, learn, and pivot, and the responsibility to be self-directed, collaborative, and insightful.

Qualifications:

• Experience identifying and solving highly complex transport problems that are open-ended or ambiguous and result in significant business or technical impact.

• Experience effectively collaborating cross-functionally at a senior level while leading, growing, and creating opportunities for colleagues to scale their own impact.

• Extensive experience in designing, implementing, debugging, and deploying kernel-resident network stacks.

• Deep understanding of strategies implemented in modern TCP and/or QUIC stacks for balancing network congestion, goodput, latency and reliability in support of SVOD applications.

• Experience with the implications for SVOD transport streams of policers & shapers, bufferbloat, active/smart queue management, and highly variable path characteristics.

• Experience using network lab environments for appropriately designed data networking experiments exploring large, multi-parameter test spaces. Experience using A/B testing methodologies for appropriately designed transport stack performance testing in production.

• Experience with clearly and concisely articulating to colleagues the technical and business implications of data-driven design choices.

You will be successful in this role if you:

• Have the ability to define and self-manage cross-functional projects fueled by ambiguous questions. 

• Are a self-starter, curious and not afraid to ask when in doubt.

• Are a quick learner and excited about learning new technologies.

• Advocate software craftsmanship, take pride in your work and enjoy taking full ownership of projects from conception to production.

Nice to have:

• Experience with software development & debugging TCP in FreeBSD environments.

• Experience with the challenges that arise when SVOD streams share network paths with cloud gaming streams and other low-latency/interactive services.

• Experience with tcpdump/wireshark, python and R (or similar tools) for network traffic capture, test orchestration, post-capture analysis and presentation.

• Experience partnering with remote engineering or product teams across multiple time zones.

• Masters or Bachelors degree in a relevant science or engineering discipline.

Be sure to review our to learn more about the unique Netflix culture and the opportunity to be part of our team.

Our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $230,000 - $960,000.

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. See more detail about our Benefits.

Netflix is a unique culture and environment.  Learn more.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity of thought and background 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.

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