Software Engineer 5 - Games Systems

Netflix is a leading entertainment company that aims to entertain the world through innovative storytelling and technology. They are seeking a Software Engineer 5 for their Games Systems team to design and operate foundational services for their gaming platform, enhancing player engagement and supporting game developers. The role involves building critical infrastructure, mentoring junior engineers, and ensuring operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Own Critical Infrastructure: Design and operate the foundational systems underpinning Games: identity/authentication/authorization abstractions, and control plane services
• Build the Developer Platform: Architect and evolve core services that form the table stakes of the Netflix Game Developer Platform — cloud saves, leaderboards, achievements, and the APIs and SDK surfaces through which game developers build and iterate
• Mentor and Grow the Team: Be a day-to-day technical resource for junior engineers through design pairing, code review, and hands-on guidance
• Operate What You Build: Own the full lifecycle from design through production, with a high bar for reliability, observability, and operational excellence

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating highly available distributed backend systems at scale
• Deep expertise in distributed systems — low-latency architecture, and fault-tolerant design, operating large-scale distributed datastores
• Strong experience building developer-facing platform services and APIs (REST, gRPC, SDK surfaces)
• Proficiency in one or more modern backend languages (e.g., Java, C++)
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), microservices, and both SQL and NoSQL data stores
• A track record of technical leadership — driving complex projects end-to-end, influencing across team boundaries, and raising the quality bar around you
• Comfort with high ambiguity — ability to define structure and clarity from first principles in a fast-moving environment
• Prior experience in the gaming industry or working on game platform infrastructure is a plus