Manager, Engineering - AI Search Platform
Job description
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.
About the organization
Content Infrastructure & Solutions (CIS) empowers engineers working on content, studio and enterprise applications to be innovative and agile in supporting Netflix's global content production needs. We do that by providing scalable and resilient infrastructure for large-scale media, assets, data, workflow and communication use cases.
Connected Enterprise Foundations (CEF), part of CIS, provides highly leveraged and fully managed data, search, workflow and messaging platforms for Content, Studio and Enterprise Engineering. CEF's charter is a connected enterprise experience: consistent, composable platform primitives that application teams and their agents build on, rather than a collection of separate products each with its own model of the world. Our sibling teams include Knowledge Foundations (data and domain modeling), Eventing and Communications Platform, Enterprise Workflow Platform, and the Enterprise Developer Paved Road.
About the team and the role
The AI Search Platform team owns Graph Search, Netflix’s enterprise search-as-a-service platform. Graph Search provides engineering teams with a unified way to index, search, and resolve entities across Content, Studio, Ads, and Enterprise. The team also builds and operates capabilities that enable internal users and agents to access the graph through natural language. It partners closely with the Knowledge Foundations team on the Unified Data Architecture, Data Dictionary, and Entity Graph.
The platform operates at significant scale today:
Approximately 19,500 weekly active users, more than double year over year
13.5 million API calls per day, up 97% year over year
233 production indices containing 13.3 billion documents, with index count up 74% year over year
More than 200 client applications consuming the search API, more than double year over year
You will lead a team of eight engineers based in Warsaw. The team has deep end-to-end ownership of the platform: it operates its own on-call, has delivered order-of-magnitude latency improvements across indexing and query paths, and has developed AI-powered operational tooling that has been adopted by other CIS teams.
The platform is at an inflection point, which makes this role particularly important:
From service to self-service. Graph Search is a powerful platform, but adoption is not yet effortless. Multi-tenancy, data product integration, and self-service onboarding are the next major steps.
From applications to primitives. The team has deliberately chosen not to build standalone end-user applications. Instead, it provides composable search primitives that enable other teams to build their own products, agents, and experiences while the team owns the underlying platform. Defining and maintaining that boundary, including evaluating when a use case does not belong on the platform, is a key part of the role.
Advance agentic and semantic search without neglecting the core. Agents are becoming first-class consumers of search, and semantic retrieval and entity grounding are major areas of investment. At the same time, keyword search remains the largest source of user value. The challenge is to advance the platform for emerging AI use cases without under-investing in the fundamentals that users depend on today.
Build a stronger discipline around impact. The team has an opportunity to become much more rigorous in connecting its investments to measurable business and organizational outcomes. Prioritization should be evidence-backed rather than strictly driven by inbound requests. You’ll also have the opportunity to shape how the team prioritizes its work and measures success.
To learn more about what the team does, check out the following tech blogs written by the team:
How Netflix Content Engineering makes a federated graph searchable
How Netflix Content Engineering makes a federated graph searchable (Part 2)
The AI Evolution of Graph Search at Netflix: From Structured Queries to Natural Language
What you will do
You will lead a team of software engineers to deliver high-impact results. In this role you will:
Be a thought partner to the product manager, engineers, and engineering managers across Netflix engineering in setting the vision, strategy, and adoption path for Search, natural-language search, and Smart Tables as platform capabilities. Ensure we build the capabilities that enable engineering teams across Netflix to design and ship AI search solutions at scale.
Collaborate closely with Knowledge Foundations and the broader CEF organization to align roadmaps across Graph Search, Entity Graph, Data Dictionary, Unified Data Architecture, and Communications Platform, so stakeholders experience a coherent set of capabilities rather than adjacent products.
Serve as a credible technical advisor to the team, helping engineers make thoughtful, well-informed decisions in complex and ambiguous situations.
Raise the team’s rigor around impact. Define meaningful leading indicators, ask stakeholders for evidence behind their requests, and deprioritize work that does not demonstrate sufficient value.
Own the operational excellence of a Tier 1 platform, including 24x7 on-call responsibilities, capacity and performance headroom, infrastructure-level data validation, observability, and SLOs that help prevent predictable outages rather than discover limits through incidents. Flexible scheduling or coverage accommodations can be supported where appropriate.
Drive AI-first ways of working across the team, both by treating agents as first-class consumers of the platform and by advancing agent-assisted engineering practices, supported by the code review, change-risk management, testing, and evaluation practices required to use them safely at scale.
Build trusted relationships with partners and stakeholders, connect opportunities across teams to maximize business impact, and prioritize work beyond the boundaries of your immediate domain when it benefits the broader organization.
Communicate complex technical and product ideas clearly through written and verbal channels and influence decisions across a diverse set of stakeholders.
Balance near-term business needs with strong engineering principles by investing in foundational technical work, paying down technical debt, and making incremental improvements that deliver timely results while strengthening the platform over time.
Lead, hire, coach, and develop a team of engineers. Challenge them to perform effectively, expand their ownership, and grow their impact beyond their immediate scope.
Foster a strong culture of accountability and help the team deliver reliably and predictably for critical business stakeholders.
Build and nurture an inclusive team culture where every team member feels empowered, respected, and able to contribute at their best.
What we are looking for
Experience building and operating highly reliable platform systems that support large-scale, business-critical use cases, including 24x7 on-call responsibilities and highly available, low-latency services.
Strong technical acumen in distributed systems, with the ability to move between implementation details and broader architectural strategy. You will represent the team’s technical decisions credibly, evaluate assumptions, and maintain strong engineering standards.
Experience building and leading inclusive teams. Ability to attract and retain talent, ensure diverse perspectives inform decisions, and foster a culture of accountability where individuals take ownership while contributing to the team’s collective success.
Ability to create an environment of open, direct communication where team members feel comfortable giving constructive feedback, recognizing strong performance, and addressing areas that need improvement.
Strong long-term strategic thinking and a platform mindset, with the ability to define and articulate a clear product and technical vision and connect it to the broader objectives of the organization.
Ability to prioritize strategically, align the team’s investments with larger business goals, and change direction when new evidence or broader impact warrants it.
Rigor in decision making and the ability to reduce ambiguity through the right combination of data, stakeholder input, constructive dissent, and targeted experiments or pilot investments.
Experience working effectively with product managers and TPMs, building trust and collaborating on both strategic vision and project execution.
Strong partnership and influencing skills across engineering partners and stakeholders, including demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across globally distributed teams and time zones.
A track record of helping teams deliver critical priorities reliably amid competing demands, while partnering with product and engineering leaders to shape where investment should go.
Fluency with AI-assisted engineering and a clear point of view on how engineering teams should adopt it safely at scale, including thoughtful practices around review, testing, change risk, and engineering quality.
Nice to have
Experience building scalable and reliable search, retrieval or data infrastructure for engineering stakeholders.
Familiarity with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, vector and semantic retrieval, knowledge graphs, or ontology and taxonomy modeling.
Experience designing platforms where agents, not only humans, are first-class consumers, including provisioning and debugging through APIs rather than a UI.
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.