Software Engineer L5, Media Foundations

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.

Good Media Foundations make life feel seamless at Netflix, for both creators and consumers of content. Our team is focused on simplifying media interchange — so that creative teams and our streaming members can focus on great storytelling with the latest consumer experiences including Ultra High Definition, High Dynamic Range and immersive audio.

At Netflix, our media processing infrastructure operates at unprecedented scale, transforming ultra-high-quality audio, timed-text and video sources into streaming formats that deliver exceptional experiences to a global audience.

Media Foundations is a team within Encoding Technologies, the folks responsible for processing petabytes of media data, building innovative solutions for scalability, fault tolerance and performance. Our microservices ecosystem handles multimedia ingest, validation, packaging and encryption with industry-leading reliability and performance. Our team’s active participation in standardization forums such as AOM, SMPTE, ASWF and W3C, as well as our contributions to open-source software, enables us to drive industry impact.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Media Foundations team, your work will directly impact how quickly and reliably we can bring new content and features to market. You’ll help Netflix remain a leader in delivering innovative, high-quality streaming experiences. You’ll also free up creative teams to focus on what they do best, while making our media processing infrastructure more efficient, interoperable, and future-proof.

You have experience designing and implementing large-scale, resilient distributed systems using microservice architecture patterns, service orchestration and cloud-native development principles.

You’re familiar with cloud infrastructure, containerization and deployment automation (AWS, Kubernetes, or similar technologies).

You have in-depth experience with multimedia compression, delivery, playback or processing systems and are familiar with formats such as ISO-BMFF/MP4, AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, IMF, TTML, OTIO or similar media standards. 

You demonstrate strong judgment, creativity and autonomy in a fast-paced environment, making decisions that benefit the business and the team.

Participation in standards forums (SMPTE, W3C, MPEG, AOM) or open-source multimedia projects (e.g., FFmpeg, GStreamer, GPAC) is a plus.

• Design and develop highly scalable, cloud microservices that inspect and process media streams, files and camera rolls.

• Build robust service orchestration and workflow management systems for complex media processing pipelines.

• Define and implement efficient data models and persistence strategies for media metadata and analysis results.

• Create clean, well-documented APIs and service interfaces.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with content operations, streaming client engineering and infrastructure teams to deliver novel features and new experiences to millions of active devices worldwide.

• Have opportunities to participate in industry standards forums and open-source projects, helping to shape not just Netflix’s infrastructure, but the future of media technology globally.

• Take ownership of code quality and end-to-end testing, advocating for best practices and continuous improvement within the team.

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer

• Deep backend engineering experience, ideally building fault-tolerant, high-throughput services.

• A strong systems design mindset, with the ability to simplify workflows and decompose complex problems.

• Comfort working in ambiguous environments, with ownership and autonomy to define architecture and drive delivery.

• Bonus points for candidates who bring exposure to media formats or workflows, but our current team has deep media domain expertise — so we’re prioritizing candidates who complement that with scalable systems thinking.

• A passion for impact: your work will shape the future of how Netflix processes and delivers content to the world.

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 $100,000 - $720,000.

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.  Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off. See more detail about our Benefits here.

Netflix is a unique culture and environment.  Learn more here. 

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.

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