Software Engineer 5 – Training Platform, AI Platform

Netflix is hiring a Software Engineer 5 for its Training Platform on the AI Platform team, based in the United States. This is a senior role for an engineer with deep expertise in distributed model training and the systems needed to run it at scale. You will help shape the architecture of the training platform, improve performance and reliability for large training jobs, and build platform experiences for ML engineers.

The infrastructure is built on Kubernetes, Ray clusters, and PyTorch distributed training primitives. The team's charter is to maximize the business impact of all AI use cases at Netflix through reliable and flexible AI tooling and infrastructure that supports product functions such as personalized recommendations, studio algorithms, virtual productions, growth intelligence, and content demand modeling.

What you will do

• Design and build the platform that powers large-scale machine learning model training, fine-tuning, model transformation and evaluation workflows and use cases from across the company.
• Co-design and optimize systems and models to scale up and increase the cost-effectiveness of machine learning model training.
• Design easy-to-use APIs and interfaces so both experienced ML practitioners and non-experts can access the training platform.
• Design, build, and operate platform infrastructure, libraries, and SDKs for large-scale model training, enabling reliable and efficient training workflows for foundation models and generative AI models of all sizes.
• Diagnose and optimize the performance of large distributed training jobs, including GPU utilization, memory efficiency, communication overhead, data loading, checkpointing, fault tolerance, and cluster utilization.
• Adopt and promote best practices in operations, including observability, logging, reporting, and on-call processes.

The role requires strong technical depth, sound engineering judgment, and the ability to influence across teams. You will partner closely with ML engineers, researchers, infrastructure teams, and platform stakeholders to identify needs, lead technical discussions, drive alignment, and deliver capabilities.

What they are looking for

• Experience with cloud computing providers, preferably AWS.
• Comfort with ambiguity and working across multiple layers of the tech stack on both 0-to-1 and 1-to-100 projects.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort working in a team with peers and partners distributed across US geographies and time zones.

Preferred qualifications include understanding modern, real-world machine learning model development workflows and experience partnering closely with ML modeling engineers; leading technical design reviews, facilitating cross-functional discussions, communicating tradeoffs, and aligning stakeholders on platform direction and execution priorities. Familiarity with cloud-based AI/ML services (such as SageMaker, Bedrock, Databricks, or OpenAI) is also preferred, as is familiarity with distributed training performance analysis tools and techniques such as PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems, GPU telemetry, communication profiling, or cluster-level utilization analysis. Experience with large-scale distributed training and parallelism techniques for scaling up training, such as FSDP and tensor/pipeline parallelism, is preferred. Expertise in generative AI, specifically training foundation models, fine-tuning them, and distilling them to smaller models, is preferred as well.

Pay and benefits

Netflix's compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; there are no bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. The range for this role is $466,000.00 to $750,000.00 per year, and the range will vary based on location.

Netflix provides benefits including health plans, mental health support, a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, a stock option program, disability programs, health savings and flexible spending accounts, family-forming benefits, and life and serious injury benefits. Paid leave of absence programs are also offered. 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.

About Netflix

Netflix is a streaming entertainment service with 278 million paid members in over 190 countries, offering TV series, feature films, and games across genres and languages. Members can watch or play as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, on any internet-connected screen.

Netflix states that inclusion is a company value and that it strives to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation or adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, you can send a request to your recruiting partner. Netflix is an equal-opportunity employer and does 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.

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