Software Engineer 5 - Games Systems

At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next. Bring your passion for games and distributed systems to help us reinvent video games at global scale. Netflix transformed how people watch television; now join us to build the next-generation gaming platform for 300+ million members worldwide and the industry’s best-in-class distribution platform for game developers. The Opportunity: Building the Backbone of Netflix Gaming Games Systems is the backend team building and operating the foundational services that power the Games Developer Platform and the infrastructure supporting Cloud Games. Our mission is to enhance player discovery, gameplay, and engagement across Netflix's entire game portfolio — equipping developers both internal and external, with the platform capabilities they need to ship, iterate, and grow their product experiences. As an L5 Software Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, and scaling services that empower game developers and elevate the global member experience. You’ll work on high-throughput, low-latency infrastructure for running games, while also building features that drive player engagement both within individual games and across the broader Netflix platform—reaching millions of members worldwide. What You'll Do 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. What You'll Bring 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. We seek to grow inclusive and diverse teams that will enhance our perspectives, skill sets, and behaviors. We highly encourage you to apply if your background will complement us, even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. Your skills and passion will stand out — and set you apart — especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns. Generally, 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 jo ... (truncated, view full listing at source)