Senior Backend Engineer, Ads Authorization Platform

Netflix; New York, Los Gatos (NY, CA); On-site; USD 388,000 - 558,000; Full time

Job summary

Netflix is seeking a senior backend engineer to help design and build the centralized authorization policy engine for the Ads Platform Foundations. You will advance RBAC/ABAC and relate policies, contribute to low-latency decision services, and work with platform, security, and IAM teams to ship scalable authz solutions.

Join a team building core infrastructure that powers access control across Ads, Public API, and GenAI foundations, while improving consistency, reliability, and velocity in a

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years backend/software engineering experience shipping production systems.
• Hands-on experience with authorization systems (RBAC, etc).
• Understanding of RBAC, ABAC, and ReBAC concepts.
• Experience evaluating or integrating policy engines (e.g., Oso, OPA/Rego, Cerbos, OpenFGA, AuthZed/SpiceDB).
• Strong systems design skills: low-latency decision services, caching, consistency vs. performance.
• Proficient in one backend stack (Java/Kotlin/Go/Node/Python).

Responsibilities

• Co-drive the build vs. buy evaluation for centralized authorization and vendor comparisons.
• Help design policy model: roles vs. permissions, org-level vs. resource-level scopes.
• Partner on decision engine architecture: low-latency checks, caching, audit/versioning of policies.
• Work with platform/security/IAM teams to integrate authz checks into services.
• Build reference implementations, SDKs, and middleware for centralized model adoption.
• Contribute to testing practices and migration plan from scattered checks to a single policy engine.

Skills

RBAC fundamentals

Authorization systems

Low-latency design

Caching

System design

Policy engines

Backend stack: Java/Kotlin/Go/Node/Py

Tools

OPA/Rego

Cerbos

OpenFGA

AuthZed/SpiceDB

AWS Cedar

Job description

Netflix is seeking a senior backend engineer to help design and build the centralized authorization policy engine for the Ads Platform Foundations. You will advance RBAC/ABAC and relate policies, contribute to low-latency decision services, and work with platform, security, and IAM teams to ship scalable authz solutions.

Join a team building core infrastructure that powers access control across Ads, Public API, and GenAI foundations, while improving consistency, reliability, and velocity in a