Software Engineer L5 - AI Observability & Agent Evaluation

Netflix, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 388,000 - 619,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health plans

Mental health support

401(k) with employer match

Stock options

Disability programs

Health savings account

Family-forming benefits

Job summary

Netflix, Inc. is seeking a hands-on Senior Engineer to build the frameworks behind the AI Observability platform, focusing on model performance, evaluation, and vendor integration.

You will design reusable infrastructure that empowers ML/AI practitioners across domains to monitor production systems and maintain reliability. You will collaborate with engineering, data, infra, and product teams to turn needs into reusable platform capabilities, ensuring scalable and robust solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience in software, AI/ML, or platform engineering with hands-on production observability.
• Proven track record designing standards, libraries, SDKs, or frameworks used by multiple teams.
• Strong coding skills in Python and at least one of Java, Go, or Scala with production services experience.
• Hands-on experience operating ML models in production (online or batch) including data quality and drift.

Responsibilities

• Build the observability framework and platform capabilities for ML/GenAI systems, including metrics, logs, and traces across inference and batch processing.
• Develop primitives to monitor model performance, data quality, drift, and degradation across systems.
• Extend evaluation frameworks for LLM and agentic systems, including prompt logging and human-in-the-loop scoring.
• Lead build-vs-buy evaluations for observability and eval tooling and own SDKs, connectors, APIs for vendor platforms.
• Create reusable libraries and templates to accelerate observability by default across new systems.
• Provide dashboards, alerts, and SLO/SLI templates to track performance, latency, cost, and reliability.

Skills

Python

Java/Go/Scala

Distributed systems

Observability

Cloud platforms

ML/LLM evaluation

Tools

Prometheus/Grafana

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

ELK/OpenSearch

Jaeger

Job description

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. AI and ML power innovation in all areas of the business, including helping members choose the right title for them through personalization, better understanding our audience and our content slate, creating high-quality subtitles, dubbings, images, trailers, and other assets, optimizing our payment processing, and much more. AI Platform (AIP) organization builds highly scalable, differentiated AI infrastructure to maximize the business impact of all AI/ML practitioners at Netflix, which is key to accelerating this innovation.

The Opportunity

The AI Observability team makes AI, ML, and Agentic systems transparent, reliable, and production‑ready at scale. We build end‑to‑end observability for ML and GenAI workloads, capturing model inputs, features, predictions, outcomes, and behavior across online and batch systems. Our platform enables teams to monitor model performance, data quality, drift, latency, and failures, turning the ML system from a black box into an explainable, debuggable system. We provide developer‑friendly libraries, dashboards, and alerts so teams can debug issues, respond to incidents, and ship AI‑powered products with confidence. We're looking for a hands‑on senior engineer to build the frameworks behind Netflix's AI Observability platform, model performance, evaluation, and vendor integration surfaces. You will design reusable infrastructure that enables ML/AI practitioners across domains to monitor model quality in production, evaluate LLM and agentic systems, and adopt vendor tooling through a consistent, self‑serve platform. AIP owns the generic, reusable infrastructure; domain teams own their domain‑specific evals and remediation. You will partner closely with engineering, product, machine learning, and data teams to turn their needs into reusable platform capabilities. To succeed, you will bring a strong background in AI or ML infrastructure and a passion for building scalable, robust systems.

In this role, you will:

• Build the observability framework and platform capabilities that give ML and GenAI systems metrics, logs, and distributed traces across online inference, batch scoring, feature pipelines, and agent orchestration, so teams can instrument their systems consistently.
• Build the primitives that let teams monitor model performance (accuracy, calibration, error rates), data quality, drift, and degradation on their own systems, rather than monitoring individual models yourself.
• Build and extend evaluation frameworks for LLM and agentic systems that support response quality, grounding and hallucination, task success, tool‑use and trajectory correctness, and LLM‑as‑a‑judge and human‑in‑the‑loop scoring, giving teams reusable building blocks to define and run their own evals.
• Lead build‑vs‑buy evaluations for observability and eval tooling, and own the SDKs, connectors, and APIs that integrate vendor platforms into a consistent, well‑supported interface, so ML and product teams can onboard models and agents with minimal friction.
• Build reusable libraries, SDKs, and templates that make observability and evaluation the default for new systems ("observability‑by‑default"), lowering the barrier for teams to instrument and evaluate their work.
• Provide the dashboarding, alerting, and SLO/SLI building blocks (plus sensible out‑of‑the‑box templates) that teams use to track model performance, latency, cost, and reliability.

To succeed in this role, you will need:

• Experience in software, AI/ML, or platform engineering, with hands‑on time in production observability, monitoring, or ML/LLM evaluation
• Proven track record of designing standards, libraries, SDKs, or frameworks that other teams build on and adopt, reflecting a platform and enablement mindset rather than shipping features for a single use case.
• Strong coding skills in Python and at least one of Java, Go, or Scala, with experience building production services
• Practical experience operating ML models in production (online serving and/or batch), including drift, model performance, and data quality.
• Hands‑on experience with modern observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK/OpenSearch, Jaeger/Tempo, or similar).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ability to work cross‑functionally with ML, data, infra, and product teams, and to communicate clearly about system behavior, quality, and risk.
• Experience with vendor integration and VPC deployment.
• AI‑Native Engineering Mindset who uses AI tools as a core part of their own workflow to accelerate design, development, testing, and code review.

Nice to have:

• Hands‑on experience with ML/LLM observability and evaluation tools (e.g., Arize, Braintrust, LangFuse, Weights & Biases, Galileo, Vertex AI Model Monitoring, SageMaker Model Monitor).
• Experience building or shipping LLM/GenAI applications and evaluating them: prompt/result logging, evaluation metrics, LLM‑as‑a‑judge, and human‑in‑the‑loop review.
• Experience evaluating agentic systems: tool use, multi‑step reasoning, and trajectory/task‑success measurement.

To learn more about our AI Platform, you can review the relevant talks/blog posts on the Netflix AI Platform Research website.

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 job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $388,000.00 - $619,000.00.

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 details 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.

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.

At Netflix, we want to entertain the world. Whatever your taste, and no matter where you live, we give you access to best‑in‑class TV series, documentaries, feature films and games. Our members control what they want to watch, when they want it, in one simple subscription. We’re streaming in more than 30 languages and 190 countries, because great stories can come from anywhere and be loved everywhere. We are the world’s biggest fans of entertainment, and we’re always looking to help you find your next favorite story.