Software Engineer 5 - Games Systems

Netflix is a leading entertainment company that is seeking a Software Engineer 5 for their Games Systems team. The role involves designing and operating foundational services for the Games Developer Platform, enhancing player engagement, and mentoring junior engineers.

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